According to a letter sent to Congress by the Treasury, unclassified documents have been stolen as a result of a hack.
Treasury Department reports that Chinese state-sponsored hackers accessed unclassified United States Treasury workstations earlier this month.
On Monday, the US Treasury Department said that hackers compromised a third-party cybersecurity service provider and managed to access documents in a “major incident.
According to a letter addressed to Congress, the hackers succeeded in accessing one of the major keys used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service that provides remote technical support to Treasury Departmental Offices’ end users.
“With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able to override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users.” A Treasury statement said the department “takes all threats against our systems and the data it holds very seriously.”
The Treasury Department revealed that Beyond Trust, a cybersecurity provider, informed it of hacking into its data on December 8. It says it’s working with CISA and the FBI to measure the impact.
The compromised Beyond Trust service has been taken offline, and, to date, there is no evidence to indicate the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said.
The letter directly accused China of its accusations towards the leadership of the US Senate Banking Committee. It stated that the incident had been “attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor”.
An APT is a cyberattack in which the hacker maintains undetected and unauthorized access to a target for a period of time. The Treasury Department said additional information would be released in a supplemental report later.
But on Tuesday, China rejected the claims with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying Beijing “has always opposed all forms of hacker attacks, and we are even more opposed to the spread of false information against China for political purposes.”
“We have stated our position many times regarding such groundless accusations that lack evidence,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.
