NOAA Employee Charged With Computer Breach Met Senior Chinese Official in Beijing

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/noaa-employee-charged-with-computer-breach-met-senior-chinese-official-in-beijing/

By Bill Gertz
The Free Beacon
January 6, 2015

A federal weather service employee charged with stealing sensitive 
infrastructure data from an Army Corps of Engineers database met a Chinese 
government official in Beijing, according to court documents that reveal 
the case to be part of an FBI probe of Chinese economic espionage.

Xiafen “Sherry” Chen, an employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration (NOAA) office in Ohio, was arrested in October and charged 
in a federal grand jury indictment with illegally accessing the Army’s 
National Inventory of Dams (NID).

The NID is a sensitive database containing information on all U.S. dams. 
U.S. intelligence officials have said the database was compromised by 
Chinese hackers in 2013 as part of covert efforts by Beijing to gather 
sensitive information on critical U.S. infrastructure for possible use in 
a future conflict.

According to an FBI document in the case made public Dec. 30, Ms. Chen and 
Jiao Yong, an official of the Ministry of Water Resources in Beijing, 
exchanged a series of emails in May 2012 indicating that the two met in 
Beijing that year and that she was searching for, and would provide, 
dam-related information for him.

[...]

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