Google and Mandiant bring news of yet another group that was operating largely below the radar, yet having great success compromising government and telecoms victims throughout the world since at least 2017. In total the gang racked up suspected intrusions in about 70 nations, with 53 confirmed breaches during operations running from 2018 to last year.
Multiple government agencieshave come together in a coordinated effort to expel a suspected China-backed espionage group. The campaign was prompted by cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, which reportedly was able to gain “limited” access to some of the nation’s telcos before being rebuffed.
Anthropic is revealing that Chinese hackers targeted Claude Code to run a large cyber espionage campaign in September that was “80 to 90%” run by their AI agents.
Both the US and UK slapped sanctions on a company called Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology that is believed to be a front for Chinese cyber attacks. The US accused APT31 of a decade-long cyber espionage campaign.
New information indicates that damage from the breach by Chinese hackers was greater than initially thought. The cyber espionage campaign may have impacted hundreds of thousands of accounts in total, including Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and assistant secretary of state for East Asia Daniel Kritenbrink.
Media conglomerate News Corp has reported that a security breach first discovered in early 2022 stretches back to February 2020 and impacted a broad array of the company’s subsidiaries. Attackers believed to be a state-backed Chinese cyber espionage team.
Public accusations of cyber espionage at a research university appear to be in response to Washington ramping up its own warnings to private industry about China’s hackers.
Researchers has observed journalists being targeted by state-sponsored hackers from China, North Korea, Turkey and Iran. Cyber espionage campaigns focused on looking for identities of anonymous sources and any “off-the-record” information.
Newly discovered Chinese hackers seem to be particularly focused on Australia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam, and engage exclusively in cyber espionage since at least 2013.
Cyber espionage effort is focusing on the emails of targets, searching entire networks for terms relating to M&A discussions and corporate transactions using specialized tools.