Collaborate Disseminate
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) continues to use every arrow in its prosecutorial quiver to go after those participants who are exposing and sharing U.S. research and technologies to China via the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Th… Continue reading DoJ Continues to Target China’s Thousand Talents Program in U.S.
Chinese hackers took pains to cover their fingerprints in allegedly hacking credit monitoring agency Equifax in 2017, but a senior Department of Justice official says an indictment unsealed earlier this month shows the smokescreen didn’t work. “They’re always going to try to make our job harder,” John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said Monday at San Francisco CyberTalks presented by CyberScoop. “And they’re also going to try to give themselves a basis to deny what it is I think that we’re proving in these cases.” The charges against four officials in China’s People’s Liberation Army for allegedly stealing data on some 145 million Americans from Equifax show just how determined the hackers were in infiltrating a U.S. company (China’s foreign ministry rejected the allegations). The hackers routed their internet traffic through servers in nearly 20 countries, wiping the computer logs along the way in a bid to […]
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Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei and a number of its subsidiaries were charged with conspiracy to steal trade secrets and racketeering in a federal indictment made public Thursday. The charges, filed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, build on a prior indictment, announced a year ago, alleging that the Shenzhen-based company had engaged in a pattern of criminal behavior that included the theft of trade secrets from U.S. firms including T-Mobile. The superseding indictment unsealed Thursday comes amid a years-long argument from U.S. officials that Huawei, as a Chinese company, presents a national security threat. Now, Huawei, the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunication equipment, also is accused of stealing source code and manuals from other vendors’ internet routers, robot-testing technology, and antenna technology, then using its subsidiaries to reinvest money made from this alleged racketeering activity. The charges also accuse the company of flouting U.S. sanctions by operating subsidiaries in North Korea and Iran. The government in Tehran […]
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U.S. prosecutors are preparing to issue new charges against Chinese nationals related to alleged hacking and insider threats at U.S. organizations, senior Department of Justice officials said Thursday. “Chinese theft by hacking has been prominent,” Attorney General William Barr said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Those actions by China are continuing, and you should expect more indictments and prosecutions in the future.” It is unclear when prosecutors will issue the next indictment related to Chinese activity. Asked when that would happen, John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, would only say “soon.” “I think you’ll see more cyber-related indictments and you’ll see more of the insider indictments that, more recently, have actually … dominated the number of indictments we’ve brought,” Demers told reporters, referring to cases in which an employee of a U.S. company is coopted into stealing sensitive data. The Chinese […]
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As the 2020 election campaigning kicks into high gear, a senior Department of Justice official says he worries that Americans are still vulnerable to foreign hack-and-leak operations that are intended to disrupt democratic processes. “One of the things that I am concerned about is the hacking-and-dumping activity that occurred in 2016,” John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said Friday. He was referring to Russian military officers’ hacking of email servers used by Democratic political organizations, and the selective leaking of those emails to the public. Despite a lot of progress on election security since Russian interference in 2016, the personal email accounts used by political campaigns are still a weak link, Demers said at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. “It really is dependent on their cyber hygiene practices…and not clicking on that wrong email,” Demers said. “What the Russians did in 2016 in terms of the […]
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State-backed hackers from China and Iran have long been spying on their country’s political dissidents using mobile malware, but new research from BlackBerry’s Cylance shows these same nation-state hackers — including groups that have previously been unknown — are using the malware to also spy on targets abroad. “It’s … worth expanding our notion of the typical target of the Chinese government: malware meant for targets of interest … for domestic reasons may very well end up inside a Western business,” Cylance researchers write in a blog post. Chinese hackers, for instance, have been using mobile malware to spy on the Uighur and Tibetan population in recent months through iOS and Android malware. But while Volexity, the firm behind the Uighur population’s surveillance research, has previously said there were “possible ties” between the two campaigns, Cylance links both to one actor. Cylance claims Winnti, a Chinese APT group better known for its targeting […]
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Chinese spies are trying the same tactics to steal intellectual property from U.S. companies as they use to cultivate assets from U.S. national security circles, a top Department of Justice official has warned the private sector. Chinese intelligence officers have looked to recruit employees at U.S. companies and use that foothold to steal trade secrets in sophisticated operations, according to John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security. Intelligence agencies, companies and research institutes in China are also coordinating deeply to pinpoint the data they want, Demers said Thursday at CyberTalks in Washington, D.C. “[C]learly, I think our cases reflect an increased focus by the [Chinese] intelligence services to do this kind of intellectual property collection,” Demers said, referring to cyber-enabled theft. The department last year tapped Demers to lead a new task force dedicated to combatting alleged Chinese economic espionage. Under the initiative, FBI officials are reaching out universities to warn them of the risk of intellectual property theft, while prosecutors are […]
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is calling on allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to bar Chinese companies from developing 5G networks there, reiterating an American argument that largely has failed to convince European countries to blacklist telecommunication firms with ties to Beijing. Esper, in a speech Thursday at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency summit in Maryland, said “every Chinese company has the potential to be an accomplice in Beijing’s state-sponsored campaign to steal technology.” His remarks came amid a standoff between Washington and Beijing in which the Chinese telecom Huawei has become the subject of geopolitical scrutiny while it also lobbies nations around the world to help build 5G wireless networks. Esper in his speech warned NATO allies that using 5G networks developed by Chinese companies “jeopardizes military interoperability and intelligence sharing opportunities.” “The U.S. military does not fight alone,” he said. “Just like the other […]
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Members of a Chinese-state-sponsored hacking group have been using their skills to enrich themselves for years in operations targeting the gaming industry, cybersecurity company FireEye announced Wednesday. By day, the group, dubbed APT41, conducts espionage in the health care, telecommunications, and education sectors, FireEye said. By night, those same hackers have manipulated virtual currency in the gaming sector and, in one case, tried to deploy ransomware, to line their pockets. In a first for China-based group, the company said, the hackers are using malware typically reserved for spying for personal gain. “Their aggressive and persistent operations for both espionage and cybercrime purposes distinguish APT41 from other adversaries and make them a major threat across multiple industries,” said Sandra Joyce, FireEye’s senior vice president of global threat intelligence. APT41’s unveiling comes as the U.S. and China are locked in a bitter trade dispute, and after years of U.S. officials alleging that the […]
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A former software engineer at a locomotive manufacturer in Illinois stole intellectual property from the company and took it to China, according to a U.S. Department of Justice inductment made public this week. The 57-year-old engineer, Xudong “William” Yao, has been charged with nine counts of related to the alleged theft of trade secrets, the Department of Justice said Thursday. The indictment returned by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleges a months-long scheme by Yao to steal more than 3,000 electronic files including source code, technical documents and other sensitive data from the unnamed manufacturing company. Within two weeks of joining the company, located in suburban Chicago, in August 2014, Yao downloaded proprietary data detailing locomotive operating systems, according to the indictment. That activity continued for six months before Yao ultimately accepted a job at a company in China that made automotive telematics service systems, U.S. officials alleged. […]
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