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CHINA'S DOGGED CAMPAIGN TO PORTRAY ITSELF AS VICTIM OF US HACKING

After the US and its allies formally accused China of irresponsible and
malicious behavior in cyberspace back in 2021, the government there has been on
a mission to cast the US in the same light.

Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer

February 12, 2024

4 Min Read
Source: Rokas Tenys via Shutterstock


For more than two years, China's government has been attempting to portray the
US as indulging in the same kind of cyber espionage and intrusion activities as
the latter has accused of carrying out over the past several years.

A recent examination of Beijing's claims by researchers at SentinelOne found
most of them to be unsubstantiated, often based on previously leaked US
intelligence and lacking any technical evidence. However, that has not stopped
the Chinese government from pursuing its misinformation campaign in an attempt
to divert attention from its own hacking activities, SentinelOne said.



"China hopes to change global public opinion on Chinese hacking," says Dakota
Cary, strategic advisory consultant at SentinelOne. "China aims to show itself
as the victim of US hacking operation and show how the US is the perpetrator of
hacking operations."

To date, the campaign has met with some limited success, as China's claims have
made their way into western media outlets like Reuters, he says. Meanwhile, the
SentinelOne report comes amid a backdrop of heightened alarm in the US about
China's insidious and persistent intrusion campaigns into US critical
infrastructure by Chinese threat groups such as Volt Typhoon.




CALLING OUT CHINA'S HACKING OPERATIONS

The immediate impetus for China's efforts to push a US hacking narrative appears
to be a somewhat extraordinary joint declaration by the US, UK, and European
Union governments in July 2021 accusing the government of indulging in malicious
"irresponsible and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace." The declaration, among
other things, blamed the Chinese government of hiring "criminal contract hackers
to conduct unsanctioned cyber operations globally, including for their own
personal profit."



The White House statement contained a reference to charging documents unsealed
in 2018 and 2020 that accused hackers working with China's Ministry of State
Security (MSS) of participating in ransomware attacks, crypto-jacking, cyber
extortion, and "rank theft". It also announced criminal charges against four
individuals at the MSS for engaging in cyber campaigns to steal intellectual
property and trade secrets from organizations in the aviation, defense,
maritime, and other sectors in the US and other countries.



The US allegations came shortly after an incident where attackers — later
identified as working for the MSS — exploited four zero-day bugs in Microsoft
Exchange to compromise tens of thousands of computers worldwide. What proved
especially irksome was the apparent decision by the Chinese hacking team to
automate their attack and to share details of the vulnerability with others when
it became apparent that Microsoft was ready to release a patch for the flaws,
SentinelOne said.

"The joint statement so irked the PRC government that it began a media campaign
to push narratives about US hacking operations in global media outlets," the
security vendor said.


CHINA LAUNCHES COORDINATED DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN

China's attempts to get back at the US include having some cybersecurity firms
in the country coordinate publication of reports about US hacking activity, then
using government agencies and state media to amplify their impact.

Since early 2022, state media in China began releasing English-language versions
of cyber threat intelligence reports from Chinese security firms. The
English-language Global Times, a publication that generally reflects the
official views of the Chinese Communist Party, mentioned NSA-related hacking
tools and operations 24 times in 2022, compared to just twice the preceding
year, SentinelOne found.



In 2023, the publication ran a series of articles on US intelligence agencies
allegedly hacking into seismic sensors at the Wuhan Earthquake Monitoring
Center. The articles were apparently based on a report from Chinese
cybersecurity firm Qihoo360 and another Chinese government entity. And last
April, China's cybersecurity industry alliance published a report that
chronicled more than a decade of research on US cyberattacks such as the Stuxnet
campaign on Iran's Natanz nuclear facility.


US HACKS ON CHINA: A LACK OF EVIDENCE

According to SentinelOne, most of China's reports are not backed by any
technical evidence of the sort that cybersecurity firms in the US and some other
countries provide when disclosing nation-state campaigns. The Global Times
article on the attacks at Wuhan's earthquake monitoring facility, for instance,
quotes a Qihoo360 report that is not publicly available anywhere. Even so, the
report garnered some attention in the US, with several media outlets running
with the story, SentinelOne said.

Reports that do have some form of attribution or evidence are often based on
leaked US intelligence documents such as Edward Snowden's leaks, the Vault 7
leaks, and the Shadow Brokers leaks, Cary says. In fact, of the 150 or so
citations in the report from China's cybersecurity alliance, less than a third
are from Chinese vendors.

"We don't know if China's cybersecurity companies have the data to back up
claims of US hacking," Cary says. It is likely that such data does exist
somewhere in the PRC, but it's unclear if it would prove their claims, he notes,
adding, "What we can say is that China's legal regime and political system have
decided against the publication of any such data."




ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer



Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience
in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld,
where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the
publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also
covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop,
Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai
covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a
Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

See more from Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer
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