The President's Daily Brief
PDB Afternoon Bulletin | December 31st, 2024: Chinese Hackers Breach US Treasury & The Taliban's Campaign Of 'Gender Apartheid'
31 Dec 2024
In this episode of The PDB Afternoon Bulletin: First, state-backed Chinese hackers have executed another major breach of sensitive U.S. networks, this time stealing a trove of documents from the U.S. Treasury Department. Then, we’ll look at the latest crackdown by the Taliban on woman in Afghanistan, part of their intensifying campaign to erase women from public life under their system of "gender apartheid." To listen to the show ad-free, become a premium member of The President’s Daily Brief by visiting PDBPremium.com. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of The President's Daily Brief. YouTube: youtube.com/@presidentsdailybrief Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
It's Tuesday, 31 December. Welcome to the PDB Afternoon Bulletin. And it would, of course, be the last PDB of 2024, might I add, because, as I think you probably already know, it's New Year's Eve. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. Alright, let's get briefed. First, state-backed Chinese hackers have executed another major breach of sensitive U.S.
networks, this time stealing a trove of documents from the U.S. Treasury Department. Then, we'll look at the latest crackdown by the Taliban on women in Afghanistan, part of their intensifying campaign to erase women from public life under their system of what is called gender apartheid. It seems like just yesterday when the Taliban were promising to protect women's rights.
Of course, anyone who actually believed that the Taliban would protect women's rights could be accurately classified as a certified moron. But first, our afternoon spotlight. We'll begin with a significant cyber breach of the US Treasury Department by a state-sponsored Chinese hacking operation.
That's just the latest in a recent string of infiltrations linked to the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. The hackers reportedly compromised the digital keys of a third-party software service provider to gain access to the Treasury Department's systems, which then allowed them to remotely tap into the desktop computers of Treasury employees and steal a trove of unclassified documents.
Well, there's that word again. Trove is now officially the PDB word of the day. Officials with the Treasury are staying tight-lipped regarding details about what documents were obtained, possibly because they don't know yet, but describe the hack as a, quote, major cybersecurity incident.
Upon learning of the breach on December 8, officials at the Treasury Department quickly notified the FBI, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and other members of the intelligence community who began investigating the incident and working to determine the overall impact of the hack.
In a letter to lawmakers, officials said all available evidence at this time suggests the cyber attack was orchestrated by, quote, a China state-sponsored advanced persistent threat actor, end quote. China, of course, quickly denied the allegations, there's a shock, which they called a baseless smear. But the incident comes as the U.S.
continues to grapple with the fallout from another Chinese cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon, which compromised U.S. telecommunications companies earlier this year in what officials have described as one of the worst hacks in American history. It's almost like the past complaints and harshly worded memos from the U.S. government haven't changed the CCP's behavior.
That breach, which was first discovered in October, has still not been fully remediated, meaning that the hackers may still be active inside America's telecommunications systems. As a reminder, Salt Typhoon's sophisticated campaign targeted U.S. telecom giants, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen, creating backdoors into the company's systems and exposing the data of millions to agents of the CCP.
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