China’s cyber spies have accessed the private emails of “many” top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.
The email grab — first codenamed “Dancing Panda” by U.S. officials, and then “Legion Amethyst” — was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.
In 2011, Google disclosed that the private gmail accounts of some U.S. officials had been compromised, but the briefing shows that private email accounts from other providers were compromised as well.
The government email accounts assigned to the officials, however, were not hacked because they are more secure, says the senior U.S. intelligence official.
The private emails of all top national security and trade officials were targeted
The Chinese also harvested the email address books of targeted officials, according to the document, reconstructing and then “exploiting their social networks” by sending malware to their friends and colleagues.
The “Dancing Panda” campaign revealed in the 2014 NSA briefing paper was among more than 30 “intrusion sets” launched by China that the NSA and other intelligence units identified last year in classified documents.
