Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi said he will work with colleagues to ‘protect our nation against these types of brazen attacks.’
Lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party have said China’s state-sponsored
hacking of the U.S. Treasury Department is unacceptable and cannot go unchecked.
On Dec. 8, Chinese state-sponsored hackers compromised Beyond Trust, a third-party software service provider, and accessed certain unclassified documents, according to a
letter sent to lawmakers on Monday by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Management Aditi Hardikar.
Hackers stole documents from Treasury workstations, according to Hardikar’s letter.
“This is unacceptable,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.)
wrote in a Dec. 30 post to social media platform X. “As Ranking Member of the Select Committee on the CCP, I’ll be requesting a briefing from the Treasury Department and working with my colleagues to ensure we protect our nation against these types of brazen attacks.”
Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), a fellow committee member, said he is ready to work with President-elect Donald Trump.
“This kind of aggression cannot go unchecked,” Johnson
wrote on X on Monday. “I look forward to working with President Trump to get tough on China.”
Describing the breach as a “major incident,” the Treasury said it became aware of the problem when Beyond Trust flagged that hackers had gained a key “used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support” for the department’s employees.
The latest cyber breach occurred when U.S. officials were still determining the extent of the cybersecurity breach from the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor group Salt Typhoon, which has been conducting extensive espionage since 2022. Last week, a White House official
announced that another telecom company was affected, bringing the total to nine, including AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink.
Salt Typhoon has already successfully targeted Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Several other lawmakers also took to X on Monday to express their concerns after the revelation that the Treasury Department was targeted.
Trump “should strike [a] major blow” for the United States against communist China, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.)
wrote, before calling for tariffs on all products containing Chinese parts.
Trump has
vowed to impose an additional 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, pointing to Beijing’s broken promises to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. During his campaign trail, Trump also
suggested that he would impose tariffs of at least 60 percent on Chinese goods, with potentially higher tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.
“This is a brazen act of aggression by the CCP against our nation,” Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.)
wrote, adding that the latest cyberattack “must be dealt with severely.”
The Treasury Department has been working with China via an economic working group and a financial working group, which were
created in September 2023 under the direction of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and China’s vice premier, He Lifeng.
The financial working group held its seventh meeting in China’s Nanjing city on Dec. 15 and Dec. 16, the Treasury Department
said in a readout. Following the meeting, the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding on “information-sharing and other areas of mutual interest in the insurance sector,” according to the readout.
Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, suggested that the Treasury Department should approach China differently, dismissing the department’s characterization of the working group as “a channel to help responsibly manage the U.S.-China bilateral relationship,” citing the readout.
“[Department of Treasury], it’s long overdue to rethink this reflexive obsession with ‘responsible competition’—Beijing just won’t reciprocate & instead hacks you directly,” Erickson
wrote on X.
Some lawmakers and experts have
called for a strong cyber response from the United States in light of China’s continued cyber hacking. Another Chinese state-sponsored threat actor group, Volt Typhoon, began targeting a wide range of networks across
U.S. critical infrastructure in 2021.
“It’s time we go on the offensive. I don’t mean defensive, I mean offensive. It’s time to strike back,” Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House’s homeland security committee,
said at a Hudson Institute think tank event on Dec. 17.
“We need to make the world aware that we have the capability. China needs to know where the knife is against their throat. I’m confident that our team has capabilities that are potentially, I think, beyond the Chinese. We just need to let them know.”
Emel Akan and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
