A China-linked cyber campaign has infiltrated thousands of government and defense systems throughout Western nations.
The “Coathangar” operation exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a firewall system used by the Netherlands and other nations on many government networks.
The operation was first discovered earlier this year, but was thought at that time to have been limited to one Dutch defense network.
The Chinese cyber campaign is much larger than previously thought, however, according to a statement by the Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Center.
Coathangar is now believed to have compromised 20,000 systems across dozens of Western governments, international organizations, and a large number of companies within the defense industry.
The attackers used the intrusion to install malware on some compromised systems and thereby gained persistent access which is believed to remain in place.
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“This gave the state actor permanent access to the systems,” the statement reads. “Even if a victim installs … security updates, the state actor continues to have this access.”
“It is likely that the state actor still has access to systems of a significant number of victims at the moment,” the statement added, and that the attackers may be able to steal data from those compromised systems.
The Netherlands’ original report didn’t clarify what information the hackers were trying to obtain.
The scope of the new discovery suggests that the campaign sought to gain persistent access into the defense industries of Western nations, though it remains unclear if all the victims were located in NATO nations or shared some other connection.
The Dutch statement said that, like many hackers, the Coathangar campaign targeted “edge devices” like firewalls, VPN servers, routers, and email servers that connect a system to the wider network.
Because zero-day vulnerabilities, which exist when a software update is first introduced, are so hard to anticipate, the Dutch government encouraged the adoption of an “assume breach” principle. This means that an initial breach should simply be assumed to have been successful and efforts should be taken to limit the damage ahead of time.
—Andrew Thornebrooke
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland testifies during a hearing by the House Judiciary Committee, Washington, DC, June 4, 2024. Republicans repeatedly questioned him about his role in Trump’s conviction in New York, which was a state trial and out of the Department of Justice’s jurisdiction. Photo by Allison Bailey / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP
GARLAND HELD IN CONTEMPT
The House yesterday voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena to produce audio tapes of President Joe Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.
In a mostly party-line 216–207 vote, the House passed a measure to recommend criminal charges for Garland. One Republican, Ohio Rep. David Joyce, joined all Democrats to vote against the resolution.
A referral will now be made to the Justice Department (DOJ), which is unlikely to prosecute the matter, so it may end up in the courts.
The resolution is the culmination of a months-long standoff between House Republicans and the DOJ over the production recordings of Biden’s two-day interview with Hur as part of a federal probe related to the handling of classified documents. Biden has invoked executive privilege over the tapes.
Speaking at the Republicans’ weekly press conference ahead of the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) argued that Garland “doesn’t get to decide whether he’s going to comply with a subpoena or not.”
Responding to the referral, Garland said it was “deeply disappointing” that the House had “turned a serious congressional authority into a partisan weapon.”
“Today’s vote disregards the constitutional separation of powers, the Justice Department’s need to protect its investigations, and the substantial amount of information that we have provided to the committees,” the attorney general said in a statement.
Hur, in reaching his conclusion not to recommend charges against the president, said that Biden would present to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
This finding sparked intense scrutiny over the president’s mental acuity—assertions forcefully rejected by Biden and the White House.
While the DOJ has turned over transcripts and notes from the interview, House Republicans have maintained that they need the tapes to verify the transcript’s accuracy and to confirm that Hur’s observation was justified.
The DOJ and Democrats pushed back, contending that Republicans wanted the tapes solely for partisan reasons.
“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal—to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” Ed Siskel, Biden’s counsel, wrote to House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a May 16 letter.
The DOJ has argued that providing the tapes would deter future presidents from cooperating with similar investigations down the road.
“I will not jeopardize the ability of our prosecutors and agents to do their jobs effectively in future investigations,” Garland said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week.
Considering the unlikelihood of the DOJ prosecuting its leader, future developments in the case are likely to happen at the judicial level in federal courts.
—Joseph Lord, Jackson Richman, and Samantha Flom
BOOKMARKS
The Supreme Court has decided not to consider a challenge to President Joe Biden’s executive order on elections until Sept. 30. The order mandates increased government involvement in voter registration and promotes mail-in voting,
U.S. veteran Sam Brown won his primary race in Nevada on June 11 after receiving an endorsement from former President Donald Trump. Mr. Brown will face incumbent Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) later this year in a race that may shift control of the Senate back to the GOP.
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told members of Congress that the order to house COVID-19 patients in nursing homes did not originate with himself, but from some “unknown staffer.” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) referred to the claim as “outrageous.”
President Biden announced a new set of sanctions against Russia at a G7 meeting on June 12. The sanctions are intended to interrupt cooperation between Russia and China relating to the war in Ukraine.
Although President Biden is trailing his opponent in several battleground states, the lack of popularity hasn’t affected Democrat candidates in those areas. Poll numbers show that Democrats have a lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada.
—Stacy Robinson
