US warns China over state-sponsored hacking, citing mass attacks on Exchange

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The US government blamed the Chinese government on Monday for attacks on thousands of Microsoft Exchange servers.

China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) “has fostered an ecosystem of criminal contract hackers who carry out both state-sponsored activities and cybercrime for their own financial gain, ” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that blamed the MSS for the Microsoft Trade hacks. The US government plus its allies “formally confirmed that cyber actors affiliated with the particular MSS exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server in a massive cyber espionage operation that indiscriminately compromised a large number of computers and networks, mostly belonging to private sector victims, ” Blinken said.

Blinken’s statement was released alongside a Justice Department announcement that three MSS officers and one other Chinese national were indicted by a federal grand jury upon charges related to a different series of hacks into the “computer systems of dozens of victim companies, universities, and government entities in the United States in addition to abroad between 2011 and 2018. ” Blinken said that typically the US “and countries around this world are holding the People’s Republic of China (PRC) accountable for its pattern of irresponsible, disruptive, and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace, which poses a major threat to our economic and national security. ”