Guatemala ministry says US embassy's Chinese hack report a years-old case

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -The U.S. embassy in Guatemala said on Tuesday it found that China-based espionage groups had hacked the Central American nation's foreign ministry's computer system, but the ministry said this was an old case.

The embassy said in a post on X that the hacking was discovered during a safety revision conducted by the Guatemalan government and the U.S. Southern Command, a military branch.

Over the weekend, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo had attended a cybersecurity exercise, along with officials from the U.S. embassy and Taiwan, at which he said Guatemala was facing "active threats."

Arevalo said such exercises had allowed the identification of "hostile attempts by hacker groups located in the People's Republic of China to penetrate the national cyber system."

However, Guatemala's foreign ministry dismissed the U.S. embassy's report of a hack into its systems as old.

"They are referring to an old case from September 2022. There has been no recent hack," it said in a statement.

Earlier this month, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited nearby Panama where President Donald Trump has said the U.S. is seeking to "take back" the country's canal, a key global freight channel, after falsely claiming China operates it.

Hegseth said China was a "malign influence" in the region.

(Reporting by Sofia Menchu; Writing by Aida Pelaez-Fernandez; Editing by Sarah Morland and Richard Chang)

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