The U.S. Treasury Department has told Congress that a Chinese state-sponsored actor gained access to some of its unclassified internal documents. China says it is not behind the attack.
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00:00Chinese state-sponsored hackers were able to gain access to internal documents of the U.S. Treasury Department.
00:05That's according to a letter from the Treasury to the Senate's Banking Committee.
00:10Now, in short, the letter says that on December 8th,
00:12the department was notified by a third-party software provider called Beyond Trust that a key for one of its cloud services
00:19had been compromised by a Chinese state-sponsored actor.
00:23That actor was able to access certain employee workstations along with several unclassified documents maintained by those users.
00:30They added that the compromised service was taken offline and that there's no evidence that the hackers still have access to Treasury information.
00:37The Chinese embassy in Washington has denied that Beijing was involved in the hack.
00:41And China has always denied involvement in any hacks against U.S. systems,
00:45but there have been several well-publicized attacks against such systems attributed to Chinese state-sponsored actors.
00:51While from a U.S. perspective, it's certainly not good that these Chinese hacks have succeeded,
00:55A cybersecurity expert I spoke with told me the fact that many of these state-sponsored actors have been publicly identified
01:02indicates that U.S. cyber defense is working.
01:04After all, these are clandestine operations.
01:06And there may be U.S. hacking operations against China that are successful but haven't been made public.
01:12So this is all part of the espionage game played between major powers.
01:17And it's not likely to be the last state-sponsored hack that we're going to hear about.
01:21Joseph Wu, Ryan Wu, Alec McDonald, and Chris Gorin for Taiwan Plus.