‘China could read e-mail messages from US government employees for years’

Chinese hackers are said to have broken into the email inboxes of many US government officials. As a result, they could have been reading the e-mail traffic for years, according to government sources. Still the attacks on email would not have stopped.

A US government source told NBC News that Chinese hackers were able to read emails from many Obama administration employees. Documents that came into the hands of NBC News confirm the email hack. According to the American news organization, the problems have been going on for many years: as early as 2010, the NSA discovered that the e-mail of several government officials had been hacked. However, according to the sources, the NSA has so far failed to contain the hacking attempts and emails are still being read along.

Exactly how the hackers penetrated government officials’ e-mail was not entirely clear. This is because it concerns the private e-mail of these persons, and therefore not e-mail provided by government systems. This probably includes Gmail addresses: Google already spoke in 2011 about a hack in which, among other things, the e-mail of American government employees was targeted.

In addition, the Chinese would have tried to find information about colleagues on the basis of address files, and then also try to break into their homes. It is not known exactly how many employees of the US government have become victims of the hackers, but according to the sources it concerns ‘many’ employees.

The United States has been in a digital feud with China for some time. Several hacks have suggested that Chinese state hackers are involved. For example, the personal data of more than 20 million former and current government employees was recently stolen. The Americans also state that they are dealing with Russian hackers who are trying to break into computer networks.