US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) shakes hands with China’s Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Wang Yi on the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on June 19, 2023. (Photo by Leah MILLIS / POOL / AFP) (Photo by LEAH MILLIS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Leah Millis | Afp | Getty Images
China-linked hackers breached the e-mail account of U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, as a part of a recent targeted intelligence-gathering campaign, NBC News has confirmed.
The hackers also accessed the e-mail account of Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, who recently travelled with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China, said NBC, citing two U.S. officials aware of the matter.
CNBC reached out to China’s Foreign Ministry for comment but has yet to listen to back.
The beach was limited to the diplomats’ unclassified email accounts, NBC said adding that Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s email account was also accessed within the breach, as previously reported.
The news, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, further fuels the fallout for the U.S. of the alleged Chinese hack first revealed last week.
Late Tuesday, Microsoft announced it had discovered that China-based hackers breached email accounts of about 25 organizations, including some U.S. government agencies, in a big breach.
The compromise was “mitigated” by Microsoft cybersecurity teams after it was first reported to the corporate in mid-June 2023, Microsoft said in two blog posts in regards to the incidents. The hackers had been inside government systems since not less than May, the corporate said.
U.S. warns China
Blinken said he raised the difficulty of the Chinese hacking when he met China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in Jakarta last week, on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations regional meeting.
The U.S. Secretary said he told Wang the united stateswill make sure the hackers are held accountable for alleged breaches of U.S. government agencies.
“To begin with, that is something that the State Department actually detected last month, and we took immediate steps to guard our systems, to report the incident – on this case, notifying an organization, Microsoft, of the event,” Blinken said at a press briefing.
“I can not discuss details of our response beyond that, and most critically this incident stays under investigation,” he added.
Still, Blinken said that as a general matter, “we’ve got consistently made clear to China in addition to to other countries that any motion that targets the U.S. Government or U.S. firms, Americans, is of deep concern to us, and we’ll take appropriate motion in response.”
The secretary’s latest meeting with Wang got here lower than a month after Blinken made a rare trip to Beijing under the Biden administration.
The visit was aimed toward soothing ties between the world’s two largest economies amid escalating tensions.
Security experts have argued the incidents reveal an acceleration in Beijing’s digital spying capabilities.
“Chinese cyber espionage operators’ tactics had steadily evolved to grow to be more agile, stealthier, and sophisticated to attribute” during the last decade, researchers at cybersecurity firm Mandiant wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
— CNBC’s Rohan Goswami contributed to this report.