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On Friday, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on a cybersecurity company based in Beijing due to its suspected involvement in various hacking incidents that aimed at critical U.S. infrastructure.
Integrity Technology Group, Inc. was targeted with sanctions by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for carrying out multiple hacks against U.S. entities, which also included attacks linked to Flax Typhoon, a Chinese state-backed initiative focused on U.S. critical infrastructure.
These sanctions were announced shortly after the U.S. Treasury revealed that Chinese hackers had gained remote access to numerous U.S. Treasury Department workstations and non-classified documents during a significant cybersecurity breach.
The Treasury Department said it learned of the problem on Dec. 8, when a third-party software service provider, BeyondTrust, flagged that hackers had stolen a key “used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support” to workers.
Friday’s sanctions do not appear to be related to the Dec. 8 Treasury hack.
Treasury Acting Under Secretary Bradley Smith said the U.S. will disrupt cyber threats “as we continue working collaboratively to harden public and private sector cyber defenses.”
The sanctions block access to U.S. property and bank accounts and prevent the targeted people and companies from doing business with Americans.
U.S. officials are continuing to grapple with the fallout of a massive Chinese cyberespionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans.