Chinese Hackers Breached Email of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and State Department Officials

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and senior officials at the State Department were victims of a newly discovered Chinese hacking campaign, American officials said Wednesday, a targeted spying effort in the spring that coincided with a Biden administration push to soothe rising tensions with Beijing.

The breaches of unclassified email systems, which some officials and experts said may have required extraordinary technical expertise to pull off, raise new alarms about the ability of Chinese hackers to orchestrate more sophisticated attacks and come at a fragile point in U.S.-China relations.

The date of the hack’s discovery in June closely aligned with the timing of Antony Blinken’s travel to China, the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Beijing in five years.

A small number of State Department employees were compromised in the attack, one of the people said, adding that it is believed the hackers didn’t access national security information. Cybersecurity specialists at the State Department were the first to detect the espionage campaign that leveraged a flaw in a Microsoft cloud-computing environment, which the company said has since been fixed.