'Chinese Hackers Mining Crypto' on Hacked US Servers

RESTON, VIRGINIA — The AP reports that investigators are blaming China for the hack in January that exposed thousands of servers running Microsoft's "Exchange" email program.

The CEO of cybersecurity firm FireEye, Kevin Mandia, says it seems clear China has now also unleashed an indiscriminate second wave of hacking.

The new hack builds on the January hack but strikes much wider.

Mandia said: "You never want to see a modern nation like China, that has an offense capability — that they usually control with discipline — suddenly hit potentially a hundred thousand systems."

The new attack started just days before Microsoft released a patch for the first attack.

Mandia said: "They could sense it was going to end-of-life soon, so they just went wild. They machine-gun fired down the stretch."

Another cyber sleuth said hackers were installing resource-demanding programs that "mine" cryptocurrencies on some "Exchange" servers that were hacked in January.

The White House has called the overall hack an "active threat," but so far has not urged tough action against China.