‘Major incident’: U.S. Treasury hacked by Chinese government

In what officials have described as a “major incident,” Congress has been warned that Chinese hackers infiltrated work stations at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

A report from Just the News said the situation developed on Dec. 8 when a Chinese-backed agent used a stolen key to remotely access work stations and unclassified documents.

“Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor,” explained Aditi Hardikar, assistant secretary for management at the federal agency.

Officials confirmed the affected stations were taken offline and a law enforcement investigation was launched.

The US Treasury says its workstations were hacked in a China-backed cyberattack pic.twitter.com/yRa9z4LPZd

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) December 30, 2024

Fox Business said it had gotten a copy of the letter to Congress and that officials called it a “major incident.”

“Once Treasury was alerted by the service provider, we immediately contacted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and have worked with law enforcement partners across the government to ascertain the impact of this incident,” a Treasury official told the publication.

“The compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information.”

Fox Business said word of the infiltration came as state-affiliated Chinese hackers continue to pursue a campaign of espionage against the U.S., pursuing phone accounts through telecoms.

“Last week, the White House said that Chinese officials accessed Americans’ private texts and phone conversations through the targeting of a U.S. telecommunications company – the ninth telecom company to be affected by Chinese hacking,” the report said.

Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser, explained, “We believe it was the goal of identifying who those phones belong to and if they were government targets of interest for follow-on espionage and intelligence collection of communications, of texts and phone calls on those particular phones.”