The Treasury Department on Friday imposed sanctions on a Beijing-based cybersecurity company, blaming it for helping Chinese hackers infiltrate U.S. communications systems and conduct surveillance on four continents.
In an announcement, the department said the company, Integrity technology Group, had supported a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Flax Typhoon in a campaign to break into foreign networks between the summer of 2022 and 2023, saying it discovered that the group had “Routinely sends and receives information from Integrity tech. infrastructure.”
The action came after the Treasury Department revealed in a letter to lawmakers this week that a Chinese intelligence agency had breached its systems in what appeared to be a spy operation, gaining access to employees' workstations. government and unclassified documents.
A department spokesperson did not specify whether Flax Typhoon had been involved in the attack on Treasury Department systems or whether the sanctions were simply part of a broader operation to disrupt China's cyber capabilities.
The sanctions also follow the much more damaging revelation last year that a group linked to Chinese intelligence agencies and known as Salt Typhoon had hacked into American telecommunications networks, attacking the phone conversations and text messages of a number of major political figures, including President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Like Salt Typhoon, Flax Typhoon is among a handful of groups that Microsoft has. publicly identified as linked to Chinese intelligence and responsible for a series of state-sponsored cyberattacks. The group has been active since 2021 and appears focused on targets in Taiwan and the United States, according to the Congressional Research Service.
“The Treasury Department will not hesitate to hold malicious cyber actors and their enablers accountable for their actions,” Bradley T. Smith, acting deputy secretary of the Treasury, said in a statement. “The United States will use every tool available to thwart these threats as we continue to work collaboratively to strengthen public and private sector cyber defenses.”
In September, the FBI saying had taken down a network of 200,000 consumer devices in the United States and abroad that had been compromised with malware and weaponized by Flax Typhoon.
The sanctions announced Friday generally prohibit financial institutions and individuals from conducting transactions with Integrity technology Group and freeze any of its assets in the United States.
It was not immediately clear what the Treasury Department breach may have accomplished, but the agency represents an attractive target for state-sponsored hackers because of its Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is responsible for imposing sanctions and determining what Individuals pose a threat. to national security.
