The US Department of Justice has filed charges against 12 Chinese nationals, including hackers, law enforcement officers, and employees of a private hacking company, in connection with a global cyberespionage campaign.
Driving the news: The cyberespionage campaign targeted dissidents, news organizations, US agencies, and universities. The US Treasury Department was also among the targets of the indicted hackers.
- The US government has been warning of an increasingly sophisticated cyber threat from China, including a hack called Salt Typhoon last year that exposed private texts and phone conversations of Americans.
The big picture: One of the indicted individuals, Wu Haibo, founded a private hacking company named I-Soon in Shanghai in 2010.
- The company was involved in a broad intelligence-gathering operation, targeting Chinese dissidents, religious organizations, and media outlets in the United States opposed to the Chinese Communist Party.
- Indictments revealed that I-Soon was involved in breaching the Defense Intelligence Agency, research universities, and individual critics of China in the US. The company charged the Chinese government between $10,000 and $75,000 for each successfully hacked email inbox.
- The hackers from I-Soon were sometimes directed by China’s Ministry of Public Security, while in other instances, they acted independently and tried to sell the stolen information to the Chinese government.
Go deeper: Two other Chinese hackers were charged in a separate indictment for a for-profit hacking campaign targeting US technology companies, think tanks, defense contractors, and health care systems.
- I-Soon is part of a larger industry in China consisting of private hackers-for-hire companies that steal data from other countries to sell to Chinese authorities.
