The United States charges Chinese agents in a scheme of piracy
The United States charges Chinese agents in a scheme of piracy
Federal prosecutors revealed the charges against 10 Chinese intelligence officials and others Tuesday, accusing them of participating in a persistent campaign to attack US aviation companies. UU In Arizona, Massachusetts, Oregon and other places.
Officials described the case as part of a drive by the Trump administration to highlight what US authorities say is China's continued efforts to steal information from US companies through cyberattacks and recruitment in the United States. ground.
Prosecutors are also expected to announce charges in the coming days against another group of hackers linked to the Chinese government. Hackers have allegedly attacked information technology service providers for espionage and intellectual property theft, according to people familiar with the matter.
Private sector cybersecurity researchers have previously identified such attacks as the work of a piracy firm known as "APT 10" or "cloudhopper", which links to Beijing.
"This is just the beginning," said John Demers, head of the Department of Justice's national security division, announcing Tuesday's case. The defendants, who are not in the custody of the United States and are believed to be abroad, are accused of trying to steal information on how to build a certain type of airplane engine that a Chinese state-owned company was also developing.
US prosecutors UU They accused Chinese hackers of trying to steal information from US companies that manufacture parts for turbofan engines.
Photo:
Sergei Bobylev / TASS / Zuma Press
The case comes weeks after US authorities obtained the rare extradition of a Chinese intelligence agent accused of a related plan to obtain technical information from employees of GE Aviation and other US companies on the design and production of aircraft engines. . The officer in that case, Yanjun Xu, he has pleaded innocent.
Prosecutors from the United States describe Mr. Xu and the officers named in the new indictment as members of a regional unit of the Ministry of State Security of China, or MSS. The officials and the people who worked for them and who were accused in the indictment tried to hack the companies that built parts for the turbofan engine from 2010 until at least May 2015, the indictment says.
A few months later, in September 2015, then-President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed an agreement in which they pledged not to carry out cyber operations with each other for economic espionage. Cases are expected in the next few months to accuse Beijing of violating that agreement, people familiar with the cases said.
Some private cybersecurity researchers believe that China violated that pact since President Trump took office, since commercial hostilities between the two countries have increased. Others question whether Chinese activity ever really declined.
"In our view, they are in total violation of the agreement," said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the US-based Cybernetics company CrowdStrike. Mr. Alperovitch said the hackers targeted "virtually every industry of interest to the Chinese," including energy, defense, technology, transportation and hospitality.
The MSS hackers named in Tuesday's indictment focused on a commercial aircraft engine that a French aerospace manufacturer was developing along with a US company, prosecutors said.
Chinese officials ordered a Chinese citizen who worked at the French company to infect the company's computers with malware, according to the indictment, saying, "I'll take the horse to you tonight," referring to Trojan horse malware.
When the French police notified the French company, which does not appear in the indictment, another Chinese citizen working there eliminated a domain name linked to the MSS group to minimize the exposure of the agents, prosecutors said.
The defendants, including the two employees, could not be located immediately for comment.
The indictment, dated October 25, was revealed on Tuesday, as a bipartisan group of eight senators sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin urging an executive order to impose sanctions on Beijing for its "continued cybernetic theft of the intellectual property of the United States and the impact this has had on the ability of US companies to compete internationally. "
Former US officials UU They said that the Trump administration should respond vigorously if it is discovered that China has violated the 2015 agreement. Some criticized the White House for creating a more combative relationship with Beijing that could have caused a increase in Chinese piracy activity.
"One of the reasons why China accepted this in the first place is that they were getting some of that," said Chris Painter, who ran the State Department's cyber office in the Obama administration. "Now that things are more loaded with conflicts, they have no incentive to comply with the agreement."
The White House and the National Security Council did not respond immediately to requests for comments.
The accusation on Tuesday landed when the White House sought to refocus the conversation on cybersecurity threats posed by China instead of Russia. Mr. Trump and Vice President Pence have said in recent weeks that China is trying to interfere in US elections, but intelligence officials said they have seen little evidence of such an operation.
However, China remains a major adversary in more traditional IT security, officials said.
In October, the Department of Homeland Security warned of an active piracy campaign targeting technology service providers in various industries. The alert did not name China, but cybersecurity researchers have previously linked the group involved, APT 10, to Beijing.
That campaign is "a serious concern," said Rob Joyce, senior cybersecurity adviser to the National Security Agency, in an interview earlier this month. "It's a broad-based farm, and if they go into a managed services provider, they can go to any of the customers of those suppliers." Managed service providers, such as IBM and Accenture, handle the technology needs of client companies, including the storage of data.
Joyce, who worked as a cyber security coordinator at the White House until earlier this year before returning to the NSA, said Chinese attacks on technology service providers were particularly worrisome, as they provide services to hundreds or thousands of people. people from other companies.
Write to Aruna Viswanatha in Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com and Dustin Volz in dustin.volz@wsj.com
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