US and allies blame China for global cyber-hacking campaign

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The United States and a coalition of allies on Monday accused China of a global cyber-hacking campaign, specifically attributing a large Microsoft attack disclosed earlier this year to hackers working for Beijing.

Opening a new area of ​​tension with China, the United States is joined by NATO, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Canada in leveling the allegations, according to a White House fact sheet released Monday morning.

The announcement comes a month after G-7 and NATO leaders agreed with US President Joe Biden at summits in Cornwall, England and Brussels to accuse China of posing challenges systemic to the world order.

The governments “will officially attribute the malicious cybercampaign using the zero-day vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Exchange server disclosed in March (…) to malicious cyber actors affiliated with (China’s State Security Ministry) with great confidence,” the senior US administration. official told reporters before the announcement.

“The United States and our allies and partners are exposing further details of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) pattern of malicious cyber activity and taking further steps to counter it. “

Chinese officials have previously said that China is also a victim of hackers and opposes all forms of cyberattacks.

US federal agencies, including the National Security Council, the FBI and the National Security Agency, will showcase more than 50 techniques and procedures that “Chinese state-sponsored actors” use to target US networks, the official said.

Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors routinely scan target networks for critical and elevated vulnerabilities within days of public disclosure of the vulnerabilities, according to the 31-page U.S. cybersecurity advisory viewed by Reuters.

“We will show how the PRC’s MSS, the Ministry of State Security, uses criminal hackers to conduct unauthorized cyber operations globally, including for their personal benefit,” the official said.

In recent months, the United States has focused its attention on Russia by accusing Russian cyber hackers of a series of ransomware attacks in the United States.

In Monday’s announcement, US officials officially blamed the Chinese government “with great confidence” for the hack that hit US businesses and government agencies using a Microsoft messaging service. Microsoft has already accused China of responsibility.

The operation specifically exploited weaknesses in Microsoft’s exchange program, a common email software package. Cyber ​​security experts were shocked by the scale and volume of the incident, totaling thousands of potential American victims.

Senior administration official Biden said U.S. concerns over Chinese cyber activities have been raised with senior Chinese officials.

“Countries around the world are making it clear that concerns about the PRC’s malicious cyber activity bring them together to call for these activities, promote network defense and cybersecurity, and act to disrupt threats to our economies and national security,” said the manager.

The official said the scale and scale of the hacking attributed to China had surprised US officials as well as China’s use of “criminal contract hackers.”

Governments will accuse actors affiliated with China of “extortion, cryptocurrency embezzlement and theft by victims around the world for the purpose of financial gain,” the official said. “We are not ruling out further steps to hold the PRC to account.”

The United States and China are already at loggerheads over trade, the strengthening of the Chinese military, the crackdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong, the treatment of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region and the aggression in the South China Sea.

The Biden administration issued a notice on Friday warning U.S. companies of the risks to their operations and businesses in Hong Kong after China imposed a new national security law last year.

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