Chinese Hackers Access Email Of US Ambassador, Compromise “Hundreds Of Thousands” Of US Government Emails

There go all the latest attempts by the Biden admin at a detente with China.

The WSJ reports that hackers “linked to Beijing” have accessed the email account of the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, in an attack that reportedly has “compromised at least hundreds of thousands of individual U.S. government emails.” Daniel Kritenbrink, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asia, was also hacked in the cyber-espionage attack. While it remains unconfirmed, the two diplomats are believed to be the two most senior officials at the State Department targeted in the alleged spying campaign disclosed last week.

Unlike previous so-called “Russian hacking” campaigns which dominated the news between 2016 and 2022 and which were fabricated by the FBI to cover up the FBI’s own criminal activity, and where everything about the perps was known instantaneously, the “contours” of the Chinese hacking campaign aren’t fully known. According to the Journal, while the infiltration was limited to unclassified emails, “the inboxes of Burns and Kritenbrink could have allowed the hackers to glean insights into U.S. planning for a recent string of visits to China by senior Biden administration officials, as well as internal conversations about U.S. policies toward its rival amid a period of delicate diplomacy that has been challenged repeatedly in recent months.”

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