Washington – Twelve Chinese nationals, including computer pirates, agents of the law and employees of a private piracy company, have been accused in relation to global campaigns of cyber crimes aimed at dissidents, American news organizations, agencies and universities, says the Department of Justice.
A set of criminal cases presented in New York and Washington add new details to what US officials said Wednesday is A booming piracy ecosystem in Chinain which the Chinese government pays private companies and contractors to direct the victims of particular interest to Beijing in an agreement destined to provide coverage and denial of the security forces of the Chinese State.
The accusations occur when the United States government warned about an increasingly sophisticated cyber threat in China, such as A trick last year of telecommunications companies called Salt Typhoon That gave Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, including US government officials and prominent public figures.
An accusation accuses eight leaders and employees of a private piracy company known as I-Soon with the realization of a wide range of computer violations worldwide aimed at suppressing speech, locating dissidents and stealing data from victims. Among the defendants are Wu Haibo, who founded I-Soon in Shanghai in 2010 and was a member of the first hackivist group of China, the Green Army, and accused in the accusation of supervising and directing piracy operations.
Previous reports by Associated Press On I-OON filtered documents Mainly he showed that I-Soon pointed to a wide range of governments such as India, Taiwan or Mongolia, but little in the United States.
But the accusation contains new revelations about I-SOON activities aimed at a wide range of Chinese dissidents, religious organizations and media based in the United States, including a newspaper identified as publication news related to China and opposite to the Chinese Communist Party. Other objectives included individual critics from China living in the United States, the Defense Intelligence Agency and a research university.
In some cases, the objectives were led by the Ministry of Public Security of China: two agents of the law were accused of establishing certain tasks, but in other cases the computer pirates acted for their own initiative and tried to sell the stolen information to the government later, says the accusation.
The company charged the Chinese government the equivalent of between approximately $ 10,000 and $ 75,000 for each email input tray that successfully pirate, authorities said.
The telephone numbers listed for I-OON in a Chinese corporate registry sounded unanswered, and I-Soon representatives did not immediately respond to an AP email requesting comments on Wednesday.
A spokesman for the China Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied the positions on Thursday, qualifying the United States “hypocritical” and pointing out the US cyber attacks in China.
“China firmly opposes the unfounded accusation made by the United States and urges the United States to immediately abuse the sanctions,” said the spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lin Jian, at a press conference in Beijing.
An accusation separately charges two other Chinese computer pirates, identified as Yin Kecheng and Zhou Shuai, in a piracy campaign for profit that was addressed to the victims, including American technology companies, thoughts, defense contractors and medical care systems. Among the objectives was the United States Treasury Department, that revealed a violation of the Chinese actors at the end of last year in what he called a “great cybersecurity incident.”
The Treasury Department announced sanctions on Wednesday in relation to piracy, and the State Department announced multimillionaire rewards for information about the defendants.
I -soon is part of an expanding industry in China, Documented in an AP investigation last yearof private piracy contractors that steal data from other countries to sell to the Chinese authorities.
In the last two decades, the demand for intelligence abroad of the Chinese state has shot, giving rise to a vast network of these private companies that have infiltrated hundreds of systems outside China.
The Piracy Industry of China increased in the first days of the Internet, when Wu and other Chinese computer pirates declared “red computer pirates”, patriots who offered their services to the Chinese Communist Party, in contrast to the popular anti-establishment spirit among many encoders.
The accusation “demonstrated the nearby ties and the interaction between China’s first generation patriotic hackers,” said Mei Danowski, a cybersecurity analyst who wrote about I-OON in his blog, Natto Pennsiling. “Everyone resorted to businessmen now, doing business with governments and obtains profits through other means.”
Since I-Soon documents were leaked online last year, the company has been suffering but is still in operation, according to Chinese corporate records. They have reduced and moved offices.
“Apparently, I-Soon companies have been fighting to survive,” Danowski wrote in his blog. “For Chinese state agencies, a company like I-Soon is disposable.”
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Kang reported from Beijing.
