China’s hacking frenzy has reached the US Treasury

When Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves visits Beijing in January on a mission to improve ‘economic and financial cooperation’ she could well find her hosts surprisingly well informed about the global financial system and Donald Trump’s plans for it – thanks to China’s hyperactive and increasingly aggressive army of hackers.

Chinese hackers are becoming far more Russian in that they are looking increasingly at undermining their adversaries and not just stealing from them

The US Treasury on Monday revealed that it had become the victim of what it called a ‘major cybersecurity incident’, which it blamed on state-sponsored Chinese hackers who accessed workstations and viewed documents. The Treasury said the documents accessed were unclassified, that the infected workstations had been isolated and there was no evidence that the hacker was still inside the system. BeyondTrust, a software provider, spotted the hackers and said they gained access by stealing a security key. They did not say how many workstations were breached or precisely who they belonged to. Beijing