SAN FRANCISCO — US officials confronted the Chinese government in Beijing in April about a sweeping cyber espionage campaign through which Chinese hackers have broken in to dozens of American critical infrastructure organisations, a senior US cyber official said.

American officials say China, under the campaign named Volt Typhoon, aims to leverage the access it has gained into US organisations in the event of a war or conflict — a nod to escalating US-China tensions over Taiwan. The Chinese have previously dismissed such allegations as groundless.

"We have had direct conversations with the Chinese about it," Nathaniel Fick, US ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital policy, told Reuters in an interview at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on May 7.

"We raised it directly with the Chinese government at very senior levels, and made clear that this kind of behaviour is dangerous, escalatory, and it's not acceptable," Fick said. He said he spoke to the Chinese officials with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in China from April 24 to 26.

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