Hundreds of thousands of U.S. government mails are believed to have been accessed in the hack by Chinese hackers.

The email of Daniel Kreitenbrinck, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, was also compromised in the cyber espionage attack.

Electronic espionage campaign

• Burns and Kreitenbrink are the top U.S. State Department officials targeted in the cyber espionage campaign uncovered last week, the features of which remain fully unknown.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, the hacking was limited to emails that were not classified as classified.
• The letters from Burns and Kraittenbrink could have allowed hackers to gain deeper knowledge of U.S. planning for a series of recent visits to China by senior Biden administration officials, as well as internal conversations about U.S. policies toward Beijing.
• U.S. officials said U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's email account had also been compromised.
• A person familiar with the matter told the newspaper that it appears that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's email account was not directly compromised into the hacking and the accounts of his top advisers.
• Instead, the hackers seemed to focus on a small number of senior officials responsible for managing the U.S.-China relationship.
• Sources indicated to the newspaper that the estimate of individual emails reached is rough and could also increase.