US accuses Chinese nationals of decade-long hacking campaign
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has charged two Chinese nationals with hacking into the computer systems of hundreds of victims, including companies working on COVID-19 research.
The decade-long operation targeted companies, governments, non-governmental organisations, and individual dissidents, clergy, and democratic and human rights activists in the US and abroad, including Hong Kong and China, according to the department.
On Tuesday, July 21, the DoJ announced that a federal grand jury in Spokane, Washington had returned an indictment charging Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi with hacking.
The DoJ said that the hackers were working with China’s Ministry of State Security and had stolen terabytes of data from companies in countries with high-tech industries, including the US, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the UK.
According to the indictment, the defendants were conspiring to steal trade secrets, covering technology designs, manufacturing processes, test mechanisms and results, source code, and pharmaceutical chemical structures, from at least eight known victims.
The pair allegedly targeted companies in the medical devices, solar energy, pharmaceuticals and defence industries, and had recently probed for vulnerabilities in computer networks of companies developing COVID-19 vaccines, testing technology, and treatments.
In January and February this year, the hackers reportedly conducted reconnaissance and accessed networks belonging to companies that had recently announced they were working on COVID-19 vaccines and antiviral drugs.
Li allegedly searched for vulnerabilities in the network of a California biotech firm on February 1, just one day after the company had announced it was researching antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19.
On January 31, Gilead announced that it was working with health authorities to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak with the experimental use of its investigational compound remdesivir.
Assistant attorney general for national security John Demers said: “China has now taken its place, alongside Russia, Iran and North Korea, in that shameful club of nations that provide a safe haven for cyber criminals in exchange for those criminals being ‘on call’ to work for the benefit of the state, here to feed the Chinese Communist party’s insatiable hunger for American and other non-Chinese companies’ hard-earned IP, including COVID-19 research.”
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