(MENAFN- Live Mint) US President-elect Donald Trump's team, which will soon have to oversee any response to the recent slew of hacks and cyberattacks, vowed to hold China accountable but wouldn't specify how.
“For too long our country has been on defense when it comes to cyberattacks,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump's transition spokeswoman, said in a statement to Bloomberg.
“The trump Administration is committed to imposing costs on private and nation state actors who continue to steal our data and attack our infrastructure," Leavitt was quoted as saying.
The statement came after US Treasury Departmen said it was hacked by a Chinese state-sponsored actor, calling it a“major cybersecurity incident”.
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Working through an outside software provider, hackers illegally accessed a“key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service” that, in turn, provides technical support to Treasury Department users, the agency said in a letter to Congress.
The software provider, BeyondTrust Inc., informed Treasury of the breach on December 8, according to the letter, which was reviewed by Bloomberg, several reports claimed.
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The latest incursion follows the White House announcement on December 27 that nine telecommunications firms had been breached by a state-sponsored Chinese hacking group known as Salt Typhoon.
American officials have struggled to combat such espionage activity from nation-state hackers, who have potentially provided their intelligence agencies with deep access into US citizens' communications and activities.
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Beijing rejected American“smear attacks against China without any factual basis,” the Chinese embassy in Washington said in an emailed statement.“The US needs to stop using cybersecurity to smear and slander China, and stop spreading all kinds of disinformation about the so-called Chinese hacking threat,” the embassy said.
Meanwhile, a BeyondTrust spokesperson said Monday night that a limited number of customers were involved, had been notified and were being offered support. The spokesperson added that law enforcement had been contacted and the company was supporting the investigation.
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Officials with the departments of Defense, Justice, and Veterans Affairs didn't respond to separate requests for comment.
At Treasury, attackers accessed unclassified documents maintained on certain workstations, the department said in a letter to Senators Sherrod Brown and Tim Scott. Scott, a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, has requested a briefing on the matter, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Republican's office said Tuesday.
A Treasury spokesperson said the compromised BeyondTrust service had been taken offline, and that there's no evidence the hacker has continued access to the department's information.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)
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