Xi know what you did last summer: China was all up in Republicans' email, says book
Chinese spies reportedly broke into the US Republication National Committee’s Microsoft-powered email and snooped around for months before being caught.
According to a Wall Street Journal report that cites “people familiar with the matter,” the Windows giant alerted top GOP officials about the security breach in early July, 2024, ahead of the party’s national convention later that month. At the time, Redmond officials told Republican party leaders that Beijing’s intruders had access to the RNC’s email system for months.
The privacy breach is also detailed in Alex Isenstadt’s new book, “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power,” slated for release in March. The WSJ previewed an excerpt of the book, and says it also verified the claimed intrusion.
Party officials apparently believe the Chinese government snoops were looking for information about how the Republicans, once back in power, would address the thorny issue of Taiwan; apparently the party’s platform documents contained no mention of the island nation.
The RNC had previously called for a free-trade agreement with Taiwan in its 2016 platform.
Additionally, early last year the Biden administration began warning that Chinese government spies had burrowed deep into America’s critical infrastructure networks in preparation for causing future destruction.
It’s feared some kind of Chinese sleeper-cell malware in water, energy, communication, and other critical systems will be activated to spark havoc and disruption to Americans on their own soil if and when China invades Taiwan — depending on the US government’s response and its support for the island and its military, of course.
GOP officials allegedly learned of the email privacy breach in the days before the assassination attempt against Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that same July last year, but decided not to notify the FBI. The concern here was that details would be leaked to the media.
The previous month, Iran government agents began leaking Trump campaign documents and emails to media outlets after compromising officials’ email accounts over the course of several years.
The FBI declined to comment today. Neither the RNC nor Microsoft immediately responded to The Register’s inquiries about the alleged email breach. We will update this story if we hear back from anyone involved.
We do wonder if this cyberespionage campaign is related to the Salt Typhoon intrusions that came to light late last year. As a reminder: Chinese government spies broke into US government networks before breaching AT&T, Verizon, and other telecommunications firms’ infrastructure, giving the snoops the ability to listen in on phone calls, read text messages, monitor people’s whereabouts and internet activities, and access other sensitive data.
While the Feds haven’t disclosed whose calls and texts were accessed by Salt Typhoon, the victims reportedly included Trump and his VP, JD Vance. ®
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.