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US Treasury Department Admits It Got Hacked by China
Treasury says hackers accessed “certain unclassified documents” in a “major” breach, but experts believe the attack’s impacts could prove to be more significant as new details emerge.
The attackers exploited vulnerabilities in remote tech support software provided by the identity and access management firm BeyondTrust, and Treasury said in its letter to lawmakers that “the incident has been attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor.” Reuters first reported the disclosure and its contents. The disclosure says that Treasury has been collaborating with the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the intelligence community broadly as well as private “forensic investigators” to evaluate the situation. On December 8, BeyondTrust published an alert that it has continued to update about “a security incident that involved a limited number of Remote Support SaaS customers.” (SaaS stands for “software as a service.”) Though the notification does not say that the US Treasury was one of the impacted customers, the timeline and details appear to line up with the Treasury disclosure, including acknowledgment from BeyondTrust that attackers compromised an application programming interface key.
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