Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday played down the monthlong theft of hundreds of thousands of State Department and Commerce Department emails by hackers based in China.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, he said that the compromised email accounts, which included those of the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, were unclassified and that the department’s classified system had not been breached. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s unclassified email account was accessed, as well.
“I can’t speak to the direct impact of any particular incident,” Blinken said in a discussion with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell. “I can say that the incident in question only affected our unclassified system.”
Cybersecurity experts cautioned that a successful hack of an unclassified network can still reveal sensitive information.
July 21, 202347:40
“No one should underestimate the damage that can be done even from unclassified emails,” said Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency. “You can glean a great deal even if the underlying substance remains secret in the classified network.”
He said that the sophistication of the attack was shown by the hackers’ ability to breach the State Department email system, remain in it for a month and target specific email accounts of senior officials. He added that it likely involved months of preparation.
“This is not a teenager getting lucky,” Gerstell said. “This is a nation state being very sophisticated.”
Blinken said that he had raised the issue of hacking with Chinese officials.
“I’ve had, you know, opportunities to speak directly to Chinese counterparts about the deep concern we would have over anything targeting the U.S. government, targeting U.S. companies, targeting U.S. citizens,” he said. “We’ll take appropriate action, if we need to, in response.”
Blinken also played down the failure of the Biden administration’s climate envoy, John Kerry, to secure an agreement with China.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the breach, which it said included hundreds of thousands of emails.
Last week, officials confirmed that hackers based in China broke into email accounts of the State and Commerce departments, but they did not say how many people were affected. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that it learned of the hacking campaign in mid-June and that the campaign lasted around a month.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
