This is according to a new NBC report which states that said hackers are part of an operation initially dubbed “Dancing Panda” that later became “Legion Amethyst”.
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Chinese cyberspies have been reading the private emails of Obama administration officials and “all top national security and trade officials” since 2010, according to a senior administration official and a top secret NSA document obtained by NBC.
Google established an attack straight into the private Gmail stories of a number of American officials in 2011, and to discover the NSA rendezvous overview that is actually e mail reports from different publishers also were really sacrificed.
The intrusion was still active during the years Hillary Clinton used her own private email system between 2009 and 2013, while serving as secretary of state.
Late last month, NBC also detailed how a cyber attack by the Chinese targeted 600 corporate, private or government entities. Neither the official nor the document identified the specific targets of the cyberspying, however.
These were personal email accounts, however; government accounts were unaffected according to the intelligence official. Hackers with suspected Russian government support were able to breach network security at the State Department, then use that as a jumping-off point to hack into the network of the White House itself. The email correspondences of top US officials have been the target of Chinese cyber espionage since at least 2008, when spies targeted the email accounts of then Senator Barack Obama’s and Senator John McCain’s presidential campaigns. The Chinese hackers have breached airlines, health-insurance companies, and other government agencies to collect intelligence on the US officials and their foreign contacts, the channel reported.
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More than 21 million people had their sensitive background and security clearance information stolen when Chinese hackers breached Office of Personnel Management (OPM) databases in early 2014. It created a map where each dot represented a successful attack.
