Category Archives: Obama-Xi deal

As China tensions mount, U.S. officials outline efforts to combat economic espionage

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In congressional testimony Wednesday, U.S. officials described the vast scope of alleged Chinese theft of American intellectual property and outlined ongoing efforts to counter such threats amid a dispute with Beijing. From 2011 to 2018, more than 90 percent of Justice Department cases claiming economic espionage by a state or for its benefit involved China, Assistant Attorney General John Demers said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “The [Chinese] playbook is simple: rob, replicate, and replace,” Demers said, describing Beijing’s alleged efforts to build technology-rich companies through stolen American know-how. China is “the most severe counterintelligence threat facing our country today,” said Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. The hearing comes at a fraught time for U.S.-China relations on technology, trade, and cybersecurity issues. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged during an interview Wednesday with Fox News that China is responsible for a data breach at Marriott that exposed personal […]

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DOJ indictment spotlights China’s civilian intel agency – and its hacker recruits

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In unsealing charges Tuesday against 10 Chinese nationals, the Department of Justice showed its focus is on China’s civilian intelligence agency, which analysts say has become Beijing’s preferred arm for conducting economic espionage. The agency, the Ministry of State Security, is more professional and technical in its hacking operations than China’s People Liberation Army, according to CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch. “We have seen [the MSS], over the years, break into [corporate] organizations,” Alperovitch said Tuesday at an event hosted by The New York Times. “They were always better technically than the PLA.” After a landmark 2015 agreement between the United States and China not to steal intellectual property, Chinese activity in that vein tapered off for about a year, according to Alperovitch. Now, he said, it is back in full force. “[W]e’re seeing, on a weekly basis, intrusions into U.S. and other Western companies from Chinese actors,” with the MSS […]

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DOJ unseals charges against 10 Chinese nationals for hacking aerospace companies

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The Department of Justice on Tuesday unsealed charges against 10 Chinese nationals, including intelligence officers and hackers, for a multi-year campaign to steal aerospace technology and other proprietary information from U.S. companies. Partly relying on a “team of hackers,” intelligence officers at a provincial arm of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) focused on stealing turbofan-engine technology used in European and U.S. commercial airliners, DOJ said in a statement. The alleged operation lasted from at least January 2010 to May 2015, the department said. The turbofan engine was a joint project between unnamed French aerospace manufacturer and a U.S.-based company, according to DOJ. The Chinese intelligence operation breached the networks of the French manufacturer, as well as those of companies based in Arizona, Massachusetts and Oregon, the department said. The indictment returned by a grand jury in the Southern District of California lays out the hackers’ alleged tradecraft in detail. “The hackers used a […]

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Chinese spy extradited to U.S. on economic espionage charges

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A Chinese intelligence official has been extradited to the United States to face charges of economic espionage, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday. Yanjun Xu, a Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) official, is accused of trying to steal trade secrets from multiple American aerospace and aviation companies. For more than four years, beginning in December 2013, Xu targeted leading aviation companies, including GE Aviation, according to DOJ. He paid experts working at these companies to travel to China “under the guise of asking them to deliver a university presentation,” the department said. Xu, who is also known as Zhang Hui or Qu Hui, was arrested in Belgium in April, and extradited to the United States on Tuesday, DOJ said. He will face trial in a federal court in Cincinnati. Analysts and U.S. officials say the Xu case is further evidence that, after an apparent lull following a 2015 U.S.-China agreement […]

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DOJ reveals indictment against Chinese cyber spies that stole U.S. business secrets

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A group of Chinese hackers recently indicted by the Department of Justice were involved in an international cyber espionage operation connected to a foreign intelligence agency, security researchers tell CyberScoop. On Monday, senior Justice Department officials announced eight relevant criminal charges against the Chinese hackers. Although the indictment was originally issued in September, it was sealed until Monday. The criminal activity allegedly dates as far back as 2011. Court documents describe that Chinese nationals Wu Yingzhuo, Dong Hao and Xia Lei hacked into and stole data from several American companies, including Siemens AG, Moody’s Analytics and GPS technology company Trimble. The trio worked together at a company named Boyusec, also known as the Guangzhou Bo Yu Information Technology Co. Business registration records show that Wu and Dong are executives at Boyusec. Conservative news outlet The Washington Free Beacon reported in November 2016 that Boyusec, which it described as a Chinese cybersecurity firm, […]

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For now, many conversations about global ‘cyber norms’ start with Beijing

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China’s government is taking steps to become an international leader in discussions concerning “cyber norms,” a formal but still vague understanding about the appropriate behavior between states regarding offensive cyber operations. Chinese leaders signed one such agreement Friday with Canada, marking Beijing’s sixth deal in two years. The first was with the Obama administration in late 2015. It curbed some cyber-enabled economic espionage by the Chinese against American companies. China is promising to end state-sponsored cyberattacks aimed at Canada’s high-tech private sector, curtailing the practice of stealing Canadian trade secrets. Beijing has now come to similar terms with the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia — four of the Five Eye nations — in addition to Russia and Brazil. In similar fashion to China’s other international cybersecurity agreements, this deal is non-binding, unenforceable in nature and only covers economic espionage. It outlines no punishment mechanism in case either China or Canada were to break the agreement. The accord […]

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How China’s cyber command is being built to supersede its U.S. military counterpart

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As U.S. leaders contemplate a proper definition for “cyberwar,” their counterparts in China have been building a unit capable of fighting such a large-scale conflict. China’s rival to U.S. Cyber Command, the ambiguously named Strategic Support Force (SSF), is quietly growing at a time when the country’s sizable military is striving to excel in the digital domain. Though the American government is widely considered to be one of the premier hacking powers — alongside Israel, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom — China is rapidly catching up by following a drastically different model. The SSF uniquely conducts several different missions simultaneously that in the U.S. would be happening at the National Security Agency, Army, Air Force, Department of Homeland Security, NASA, State Department and Cyber Command, among others. If you combined all of those government entities and added companies like Intel, Boeing and Google to the mix, then you would come close to how the […]

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