Washington:

The US Treasury Department said Monday that a China state-sponsored actor was behind a cyber breach resulting in access to some of its workstations, according to a letter to Congress seen by AFP.

The incident happened earlier this month, when the actor compromised a third-party cybersecurity service provider and was able to remotely access the Treasury workstations and some unclassified documents, a Treasury spokesperson added.

Treasury contacted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency after it was alerted of the situation by its provider BeyondTrust, and has been working with law enforcement partners to ascertain the impact.

“The compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” the department’s spokesperson added.

In its letter to the leadership of the Senate Banking Committee, the Treasury said: “Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor.”

The department did not provide further details on what was affected by the breach, but said more information would be released in a supplemental report at a later date.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Less than two weeks after global outage, dubbed as “blue screen of death”, Microsoft suffered another similar incident, which the company said was triggered by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattack. According to Forbes, the latest attack was reported by several users on Tuesday in which users complained of not being able to access several Microsoft services, such as Office, Outlook and Azure. The incident lasted nearly 10 hours. Companies affected by the new outage include UK bank NatWest, as per the BBC.

Other impacted services included Azure App Services, Application Insights, Azure IoT Central, Azure Log Search Alerts, Azure Policy, as well as the Azure portal itself and “a subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services”.

The tech giant said it was a DDoS attack that floods a service with traffic in order to bring them to a standstill.

Firms usually put protection in place for DDoS attacks, but an error in the implementation of defences “amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it”, said Microsoft.

This is the second major attack in nearly as many weeks. A Microsoft error had crippled Windows computers worldwide on July 19. It was later revealed that an update to the anti-virus program ‘Falcon Sensor’ by CrowdStrike caused the massive outage.

From airlines to news channels, the glitch led to the crashing of IT systems, disrupting the daily proceedings.

CrowdStrike’s products are predominantly used by major organisations needing robust cyber attack protection, which is why the attack caused a global outage.

Reacting to the glitch, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said it was not a security incident or cyberattack. The company identified the issue, isolated it and deployed a fix.