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Chinese hacking group targeting US agencies and companies has increased activity, analysis finds

Chinese hacking group targeting US agencies and companies has increased activity, analysis finds

 


Washington CNN—

An elite Chinese hacking group with ties to agents indicted by a US grand jury in 2020 has stepped up its activities this year, targeting sensitive data held by companies and government agencies in the US and dozens of countries around the world. other countries, according to an expert from consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The findings highlight the biggest cyber espionage challenge facing the Biden administration: fighting a Chinese hacking program that the FBI has called more prolific than that of all the other governments in the world combined.

The Justice Department has aggressively sought to expose alleged data theft campaigns through indictments and argued that Chinese hackers stole intellectual property from American companies, causing huge losses. But China-based hackers have often developed new tools or changed their operations, analysts said.

One of the Chinese groups tracked by PwC has targeted dozens of U.S. organizations over the past year, including government agencies and software or technology companies, said Kris McConkey, who leads the global practice of PwC Cyber ​​Threat Intelligence. Intruders often scour networks for data that could offer insight into foreign or trade policy, he said, but also engage in cryptocurrency schemes for personal gain. He declined to detail what kinds of US government agencies, whether federal, state or local, were being targeted.

They are, by far, the most active and influential globally [hacking group] that we’re tracking by the minute, McConkey, who closely tracks China-based hackers, told CNN. He believes the attackers have managed to breach at least some organizations as they operate at scale, targeting organizations in at least 35 countries this year alone.

McConkey traced some of the activity to an ostensibly legitimate cybersecurity firm based in the Chinese city of Chengdu, but he refrained from publicly linking the hack to the Chinese government. US officials have for years accused China of using front companies to carry out hacks that fuel the government’s sprawling intelligence-gathering efforts.

China has repeatedly denied the hacking allegations, and Beijing has stepped up its own accusations in recent months that Washington conducted cyber operations against Chinese assets.

Cybersecurity issues have been a repeated source of friction between the world’s two largest economies; President Joe Biden raised the topic during a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping last year.

McConkey was one of multiple private cyber specialists who exposed the operations, and sometimes alleged locations, of hackers from China, Iran and elsewhere at a recent conference called LABScon, hosted by the US security firm SentinelOne in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Adam Kozy, who tracked Chinese hackers at the FBI from 2011 to 2013, showed the public a photo of a People’s Liberation Army building in the city of Fuzhou that is believed to house officers who conduct information operations against Chinese opponents. This unit has targeted Taiwan, Kozy said, and is China’s main area of ​​disinformation operations.

In their investigations of foreign hackers, FBI and Justice Department prosecutors have relied on such revelations from private researchers.

At least one FBI agent and officials from the National Security Agency and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency attended the conference, recalling how government officials depend on data held by tech companies to prosecute spies and hackers. cybercriminals. Sometimes this work is not done in a classified establishment but in the corridors of a luxury hotel.

NSA Morgan Adamski, a senior NSA official, told conference attendees that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way his agency works with private companies to protect sensitive data targeted by hackers.

The pandemic actually helped because it no longer revolved around large government meetings in a hall, in a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility]where you couldn’t use any of the information, said Adamski, who directs the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, which works with defense contractors to mitigate the impact of foreign hacking.

After US defense contractors began working from home during the pandemic, she said, Chinese government hackers exploited the virtual private network (VPN) software the contractors were using. A hacked contractor, whom she did not name, shared data with federal agencies so they could get a clearer picture of what was going on.

Asked by CNN whether the NSA and other federal agencies responding to hacks were able to expel the Chinese hackers, Adamski said it was an iterative process.

When you talk about nation-state actors, you’re kicking them out, but they’re going to come back, Adamski said, especially if you’re a defense industrial base company producing critical military intelligence for the Department of Defense.

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