WASHINGTON (AP) — Eight leaders or members of a Chinese hacking company have been charged alongside two Chinese law enforcement officers in a global cyberespionage campaign that targeted dissidents, news organizations and U.S. agencies, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.
A set of criminal cases adds new detail to what U.S. officials say is a hacking-for-hire ecosystem in China, in which private companies and contractors are paid by the Chinese government to target victims of particular interest to Beijing.
One indictment charges officials with a private hacking company known as I-Soon, whose officials conducted a sweeping array of breaches around the world as part of what U.S. officials say was a broad intelligence-gathering operation.
The targets were in some cases directed by China’s Ministry of Public Security — two law enforcement officers were also charged — but in other instances the hackers acted at their own initiative and tried to sell the stolen information to the government afterward, the indictment says. The company charged the government the equivalent of between approximately $10,000 and $75,000 for each email inbox it successfully hacked, officials said.
Among the targets of the hacking was the U.S. Treasury Department, which disclosed a breach by Chinese actors late last year in what it called a “major cybersecurity incident.”
Phone numbers listed for I-Soon on a Chinese corporate registry rang unanswered, and I-Soon representatives did not immediately respond to an AP email requesting comment.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington suggested that the allegations were a “smear” and said, “We hope that relevant parties will adopt a professional and responsible attitude and base their characterization of cyber incidents on sufficient evidence rather than groundless speculation and accusations.”
A separate indictment charges two other Chinese hackers in a for-profit hacking campaign that targeted victims including U.S. technology companies, think tanks, defense contractors and health care systems.
I-Soon is part of a sprawling industry in China, documented in an Associated Press investigation last year, of private hacking contractors are companies that steal data from other countries to sell to the Chinese authorities.
Over the past two decades, Chinese state security’s demand for overseas intelligence has soared, giving rise to a vast network of these private hackers-for-hire companies that have infiltrated hundreds of systems outside China.
