The UK and European Union have accused China of carrying out a major cyber attack earlier this year the attack targeted Microsoft Exchange servers and affected over a quarter of a million servers all around the world, the countries also accused the Chinese ministry of state security of other espionage activity with is our security correspondent Gordon Carrera and Gordon does this accusation come as anything different.
China's been accused of state-backed sort of espionage this is a significant escalation seen by the EU come out of the UK.
In the last few hours the u.s nato Australia Canada New Zealand an unusually broad alliance of countries calling out china the reason being that the activity was particularly reckless that Microsoft exchange hack which happened earlier.
This year compromised certainly tens of thousands of machines at the very least and it created a back door which then other hackers including criminal groups were able to exploit there was a sense that this was a different type of behavior and a more reckless behavior linked to the Chinese state which a range of countries wanted to call out as an unacceptable type of attack sounds like it's different from other cyber attacks that we've reported on well, there's an element in which started off as espionage.
Russia has been accused of recent solar winds but certainly, the UK and others also, carry out espionage there was a moment in late February where this attack kind of switched where basically it went from a targeted attack to a mass attack in which tens of thousands of computers in small businesses and organizations were left vulnerable and with the possibility of this risk being passed to other hackers and hacking groups that are what made this slightly different and why people wanted to call it out the countries have also called out other Chinese espionage activities more.
Security this kind of very public attribution will push china to try and restrain some of those cyber actors from carrying out these kinds of activities in the future and if china was behind these attacks as they've accused china of being what would it be hoping to achieve is it to spy on companies to get corporate secrets is it spy on governments.
There was an extra element of recklessness in terms of the scale of what was going on and the kinds of organizations that were being compromised leaving them vulnerable to other hacking groups and that's what made this slightly different from if you like traditional espionage which all states do include western states okay Gordon thank you very much indeed, Gordon Carrera, there our security correspondent.
Biden Administration Blaming China For Hack Of Microsoft Exchange Email Server Software That Hack Compromise Tens Of Thousands Of Computers Around The World Earlier This Year The Hack Was First Identified In January And Was Rapidly Attributed To Chinese Cyber Spies By Private Sector Groups Administration Officials Said It Took Until Now Though To Affiliate The Half With The Right People Because Of Multiple Reasons One Being The Administration Wanted To Pair The Announcement With Guidance On Tactics Chinese Hackers Might Be Using No Sanctions Imposed As A Result Of The White House.
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