US authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a US government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers, officials and industry experts said.
Surreptitious copying is believed to have occurred when a laptop was left unattended during Gutierrez’s trip to Beijing for trade talks in December, people familiar with the incident said. speaking on condition of anonymity.
Gutierrez said on Thursday he could not discuss whether or how the laptop’s contents might have been copied.
“Because there is an investigation going on, I would rather not comment on that,” he said. “To the extent that there is an investigation going on, those are the things being looked at, those are the questions being asked. I don’t think I should provide any speculative answers.”
Rich Mills, a Commerce Department spokesman, said he could not confirm or deny such an incident in China.
Asked whether the department has issued new rules for carrying computers overseas, Mills said: “The department is continuing to improve our security posture, and that includes providing updates, guidances and best practices to staff to maintain security.”
It was not immediately clear what information on the laptop might have been compromised, but it would be highly unorthodox for any US government official to carry classified data on a laptop overseas to China, especially one left unattended even briefly.
Modern copying equipment can duplicate a laptop’s storage drive in just minutes.
The report of the incident is the latest in a series of cyber security problems blamed on China and comes at a sensitive time, with trade issues looming between the countries. Gutierrez returned just weeks ago from another trip to Beijing, where he noted he had “traveled here more than to any other foreign city during my tenure as commerce secretary.”
In the period after Gutierrez returned from China in December, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), comprising some of the government’s leading computer forensic experts, rushed to the Commerce Department at least three times to respond to attempts at data break-ins, officials said.
“There’s nothing to substantiate an actual compromise at this time,” said Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Knocke said he was unable to find records of a DHS investigation. He said US-CERT workers have visited the Commerce Department eight times since December, but none of those visits related to laptops or the secretary’s trip to China.
FBI officials refused comment.
It was not clear if leaving the laptop unattended violated US government rules. Some agencies, such as Homeland Security, routinely provide officials with sanitized laptops to carry on trips overseas and require them to leave in the US their everyday laptops.
“We have rules in place,” Gutierrez said. “We have procedures that people go through before they travel. So, there is a very significant process in place. Technology is obviously moving very quickly, and we have to move very quickly with it. But all of that is something that we are going through.”
A senior US intelligence official, Joel Brenner, recounted a separate story of an American financial executive who traveled to Beijing on business and said he had detected attempts to remotely implant monitoring software on his handheld “personal digital assistant” device that could have infected the executive’s corporate network when he returned home.
The executive “counted five beacons popped into his PDA between the time he got off his plane in Beijing and the time he got to his hotel room,” Brenner, chief of the office of the National Counterintelligence Executive under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said during a speech in December.
Brenner recommended throwaway cellphones for any business people traveling to China.
“The more serious danger is that your device will be corrupted with malicious software that takes only a second or two to download — and you will not know it — and that can be transferred to your home server when you collect your e-mail,” he said.
The Pentagon, State Department and Commerce Department all have been victimized by widespread computer intrusions blamed on China since July 2006.
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