Summary
Chinese government hackers targeted the US Treasury offices overseeing economic sanctions, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Office of Financial Research, via a breach disclosed earlier this week.
Hackers accessed unclassified documents by compromising third-party cybersecurity provider BeyondTrust. Officials suggest China sought information on entities potentially facing US sanctions.
Beijing denied the allegations, calling them baseless. This incident follows other cyberattacks, including breaches of major US telecom firms.
The hack underscores US-China tensions, with sanctions remaining a key US foreign policy tool against Beijing.
Effective and efficient can be different. Some sanctions could be very effective, as in they ultimately achieve the intended goal, but very inefficient as they use a lot of resources. Other sanctions might not be effective on their own, but could be very efficient, as they us very little resources on your own side.
For the latter iirc. when Trump started a trade war with the EU, the EU mostly sanctioned agricultural products from areas where Trump was particularly popular. It didn’t cause that much damage to the US economy, but it was very cheap for the EU to substitute these products and caused disproportionate political damage.