The State Department relied on a clever alert system to uncover and unravel an advanced Chinese spying campaign that involved breaches of officials’ emails.
State Department personnel first built the alert — known internally as “Big Yellow Taxi” — roughly two years ago out of an abundance of caution, according to Gharun Lacy, deputy assistant secretary and assistant director of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service for Cyber and Technology Security. That’s when an agency analyst spotted a potential security gap involving an unidentified application that was connected to cloud email inboxes.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo chats with officials at the Shanghai Disneyland on Aug. 30, 2023. Raimondo was one of the senior government officials whose unclassified emails were compromised in a Chinese-linked hack, which Microsoft disclosed in July. | Pool photo by Andy Wong The team eventually determined that it merited a “significant cyber incident response plan,” which once activated involves creating a task force to focus on the disruption. Lacy said in this case, it included sending a diplomatic courier overseas to “gather critical evidence,” bringing in law enforcement personnel, and using artificial intelligence to analyze the data from the incident.
Other federal agencies were also closely following the incident. Bennett said the CIO Council, a group of federal agency IT leaders, had “multiple meetings” each day after discovering the breach. Ultimately, Microsoft determined the software fix had done its job, and it went public with the incident in July. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s response.
When it comes to new types of data some companies now have access to, what matters is “how you use it,” said Fletcher.
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