WASHINGTON — China-linked hackers accessed the email account of U.S Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns as part of a recent targeted intelligence-gathering campaign, two U.S. officials familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News.
The hackers also breached the email account of Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia, the officials said. Kritenbrink recently traveled with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China.
The breach, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, was limited to the diplomats’ unclassified email accounts, the officials said.
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s email account was also accessed in the breach, according to the officials.
Blinken in June went to China for a two-day trip in an effort to cool tensions between Beijing and Washington.
The secretary of state also met with Chinese diplomat Wang Yi during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, earlier this month.
That meeting was in part designed to “responsibly manage competition by reducing the risk of misperception and miscalculation,” a spokesman for the State Department said at the time.
More details about the breach of the diplomats’ email accounts were breached were not immediately available.
Last week, officials confirmed that hackers based in China broke into email accounts of the State Department and the Commerce Department, but they did not say how many individuals were affected. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it first learned of the hacking campaign in mid-June, and the campaign lasted around a month.
After State and Commerce department officials said that the accounts of people in their agencies were breached, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin urged U.S. officials to provide more details.
“The U.S. side should give an account of its cyberattacks as soon as possible, rather than spreading false information to divert attention,” he said at a July 13 briefing, according to state-owned China News Service.
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that “the scale of the Chinese cyber threat is unparalleled.”
“They’ve got a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations — big or small — combined,” he said at the time.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
