Senate officials say they were told in January 2021 about phishing emails targeting parliamentary accounts—attacks that were later attributed to hackers acting on behalf of Beijing.
The officials say some of the emails made it through firewalls and landed in senators’ email inboxes, but no one opened the messages and the attackers did not gain access to information on Senate servers.
Senate officials described the chain of events in an interview earlier this month with a federal inquiry into foreign interference, and a summary of the conversation was presented today during inquiry hearings.
The officials say senators’ offices were immediately contacted to ensure any emails were destroyed, and the upper chamber’s information services directorate did a search of the Senate database to check that emails were deleted….