Chinese hackers who overturned the email platform of Microsoft earlier this year operated to steal 60,000 of emails from US State Department accounts, a Senate staffer told Reuters on Wednesday.
About 60,000 emails were stolen from 10 various State Department accounts, the staffer, who attended a briefing of State Department IT officials, said the officials told lawmakers. Although the victims were still unnamed, all but one of them were working in East Asia and the Pacific, he said.
The staffer, who works for Senator Eric Schmitt, shared a few details of the briefing on the situation that he not be identified by his name.
Allegations that Beijing hacked the State Department – along with two dozen other, especially still unknown organizations – have weakened an already uneasy US-China relationship; China has refused to be behind the espionage.
The hack has also refocused attention on Microsoft’s outsize part in delivering IT services to the United States government.
In a statement, shared by the staffer in an email to Reuters following the briefing, Schmitt said, “We need to harden our defenses against these types of cyberattacks and intrusions in the future.”
He added, “We need to take a hard look at the federal government’s reliance on a single vendor as a potential weak point.”
