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Pakistan

lier this year, foreign exchange reserves fell to less than $4 billion. This money was only enough for the import bill of four weeks, although Pakistan banned some of the imports to save dollars.

The approval for the IMF loan came a day after Saudi Arabia deposited $2 billion into Pakistan’s central bank. On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates also deposited $1 billion to the central bank of Pakistan, according to the finance minister, Dar, who said the country’s economy was now again on the path of growth.

According to analysts, the approval of the IMF bailout will help Pakistan because it could encourage other international financial institutions to help Islamabad overcome economic challenges.

Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have provided financial assistance in the past five months to avoid a default on debt payments.

In May, Russia launched dozens of drones and missiles at Kyiv almost every night, forcing its residents to spend their nights in shelters. During the summer, attacks came less frequently, but they still strike unpredictably across the country.

Ukraine’s human rights chief Dmytro Lubinets wrote on Telegram Thursday, “It should be explained that each ‘air alarm’ in Ukraine is like playing Russian roulette... It’s unknown the number of people who could be affected, and it is uncertain from which part of Ukraine bad news about the strike of an enemy drone or missile will come.”

Recently, a Russian cruise missile struck an apartment building in the western city of Lviv, resulting in a death toll that reached 10, and leaving dozens injured. And in the southern and eastern regions of the country, where heavy fighting is taking place on front lines, the intensity of missile attacks has remained high since the beginning of the war.

T he Associated Press journalist Felipe Dana in Kyiv contributed to this report.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s e-mail hacked in breach tied to China

By William Turton, Leah Nylen & Sarah Zheng

COMMERCE Secretary Gina Raimondo was among the US officials whose e-mails were breached in a hack of government accounts that Microsoft Corp. has said originated from China, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Raimondo has been a prominent American figure implementing export curbs on advanced semiconductor technology to China, moves which Beijing has decried as undermining free trade and global supply chain stability. The person asked not to be identified discussing information that hasn’t been made public.

A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment or confirm the breach of Raimondo’s e-mails, which was reported earlier by the Washington Post. Microsoft also declined to comment late Wednesday night.

The Commerce and State Departments as well as agencies in Western Europe were also attacked, according to government officials and Microsoft.

C ommerce took immediate action after being notified by Microsoft that the department had been breached, the spokesperson said earlier Wednesday.

Last month, the US State Department identified anomalous activity and alerted Microsoft to the attack, according to a spokesperson, who said the agency had no reason to doubt that the hackers, who breached Microsoft Outlook accounts, were based in China.

A subsequent investigation by the company determined that the hackers accessed and exfiltrated unclassified Exchange Online Outlook data from a small number of accounts,” according to a statement from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA.

It wasn’t known what other US agencies were affected, but a senior official said the number was in the single digits. US officials described the attacks as targeted and focused on a small number of accounts at the agencies that were breached, as opposed to hack seeking to steal large amounts of data. CISA and the FBI issued a joint advisory urging organizations to harden their Microsoft 365 cloud environments.

The hacking campaign got underway in the weeks before Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Beijing to meet with top officials, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to the officials.

In a blog post published Tuesday night, Microsoft described the group behind the attack as China-based, calling it Storm-0558. The hackers were able to remain undetected for a month after gaining access to e-mail data from around 25 organizations in mid-May.

“We assess this adversary is focused on espionage, such as gaining access to e-mail systems for intelligence collection,” Charlie Bell, an executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote in another post.

It also wasn’t clear which European governments were affected. Italian cybersecurity officials said they were in contact with Microsoft “in order to identify potential Italian subjects involved in the latest attacks.”

Asked about the findings, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, at a regular briefing on Wednesday, accused the US of being the world’s largest cyber attacker.

The hackers used “forged authentication tokens to access user e-mail using an acquired Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key,” Microsoft’s Bell said in his post. The hackers were then able to access Outlook e-mail hosted on systems run and operated by Microsoft. With assistance from James Mayger, Justin Sink, Iain Marlow, Flavia Rotondi, Katrina Manson and Eric Martin/ Bloomberg