The U.S. Treasury on Friday sanctioned a Beijing-based cybersecurity company for its alleged role in multiple hacking incidents targeting critical U.S. infrastructure.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control hit Integrity Technology Group, Inc. with sanctions Friday morning, for conducting multiple hacks against U.S. victims, including incidents attributed to Flax Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored campaign that targets U.S. critical infrastructure.
The sanctions come a couple of days after Treasury reported that Chinese hackers remotely accessed several U.S. Treasury Department workstations and unclassified documents in a significant cybersecurity incident.
The Treasury Department said it learned of the issue on Dec. 8, when a third-party software service provider, BeyondTrust, flagged that hackers had stolen a key “utilized by the seller to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support” to staff.
Friday’s sanctions don’t look like related to the Dec. 8 Treasury hack.
Treasury Acting Under Secretary Bradley Smith said the U.S. will disrupt cyber threats “as we proceed working collaboratively to harden private and non-private sector cyber defenses.”
The sanctions block access to U.S. property and bank accounts and stop the targeted people and corporations from doing business with Americans.
U.S. officials are continuing to grapple with the fallout of an enormous Chinese cyberespionage campaign generally known as Salt Typhoon that gave officials in Beijing access to personal texts and phone conversations of an unknown variety of Americans.
