Acusaciones de Estados Unidos contra hackers y funcionarios chinos por campaña cibernética

Twelve Chinese citizens, including mercenary hackers, law enforcement, and employees of a private hacking company, have been charged with global criminal cyber campaigns against dissidents, news organizations, agencies, and American universities, announced the Department of Justice on Wednesday.

Several criminal cases opened in New York and Washington add new details to what U.S. officials describe as a thriving on-demand hacker ecosystem in China, where the Chinese government pays private companies and contractors to target victims of special interest to Beijing, in a deal to provide security for the Chinese state.

The charges come at a time when the U.S. government has warned of an increasingly sophisticated cyber threat, including a hacking last year into telecommunications called Salt Typhoon that gave Beijing access to private text and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, including U.S. government and public figures.

One of the charges accuses eight leaders and employees of a private hacking company known as I-Soon of committing a wide range of computer violations worldwide, aimed at suppressing freedom of expression, locating dissidents, and stealing victims’ data. The accused include Wu Haibo, who founded I-Soon in Shanghai in 2010 and was a member of China’s first group of hacktivists, the Green Army, and is accused of overseeing and directly engaging in hacking operations.

Prior AP reports on leaked I-Oon documents have primarily shown that I-Soon targets a wide range of governments like India, Taiwan, or Mongolia, but little about the United States.

However, the indictment contains new revelations about I-Soon’s activities targeting a wide range of Chinese dissidents, religious organizations, and U.S.-based media, including a newspaper identified as a news editor related to China and critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Other targets were China-critical individuals residing in the U.S., the Defense Information Agency, and a research university.

The planned targets were, in some cases, directed by China’s Ministry of Public Security, two officials were also charged with assigning certain tasks, but, in other instances, the hackers acted on their own initiative and attempted to sell the stolen information to the government, the indictment says.

The company charged the Chinese government the equivalent of $10,000 to $75,000 for each email account they successfully hacked, according to officials.

The phone numbers listed for I-Oson in a Chinese corporate registry went unanswered, and representatives of I-Soon have not yet responded to an email from AP requesting comments.

A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, suggested that the charges were «defamation» and said, «We hope that relevant parties will take a professional and responsible attitude and base their cyber incidents on sufficient evidence rather than speculation and unfounded accusations.»

A separate indictment charged two other Chinese hackers, identified as Yin Kecheng and Zhou Shuai, in a spear-phishing campaign targeting victims including U.S. technology companies, think tanks, defense contractors, and healthcare systems. Among the targets was the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which disclosed a Chinese actor breach late last year in what it called a «significant cyber security incident» and was one of the targets of the accused hackers.

The Treasury Department announced sanctions on Wednesday in this case, and the State Department has announced a reward of up to $2 million for information leading to both men.

I-Oson is part of a vast industry in China, documented in an Associated Press investigation last year, of private hacking contractors who steal from other countries to sell to Chinese authorities.

Over the past two decades, the demand for foreign intelligence by the Chinese state security has increased, giving rise to a vast network of these on-demand hacker companies that have infiltrated hundreds of systems outside of China.