WASHINGTON (AP) – Hackers running with the Chinese government have targeted corporations receiving coronavirus vaccines and stole millions of dollars in high-value assets and industrial secrets from corporations around the world, the Justice Department said Tuesday when uttering corrupt charges.
The indictment does not accuse the two Chinese defendants of actually obtaining an investigation into the coronavirus, however, stressing that clinical innovation has been a major target for foreign governments and hackers seeking to locate which U.S. corporations are emerging into the pandemic. In this case, the hackers looked for vulnerabilities in the PC networks of biotechnology corporations and diagnostic corporations that were preparing vaccines and verification kits and looking for antiviral drugs.
The allegations are the latest in a series of competitive moves through the Trump administration opposed to China. They arrived when President Donald Trump, his re-election clients broken by the coronavirus outbreak, blamed China for the pandemic and administration officials stepped up their Beijing allegations, adding over alleged efforts to borrow high-value assets through hacking.
The indictment includes industry secret theft fees and conspiracy to defraud hackers, former classmates of an electrical engineering school who prosecutors say have worked in combination for more than a decade aimed at high-tech corporations in more than 10 countries.
The hackers, known as Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi, stole data only for their own non-public benefit, but also for studies and generation that they knew would be valuable to the Chinese government, prosecutors said.
In some cases, according to the indictment, they provided a Chinese intelligence service officer working with email accounts and passwords belonging to clerics, dissidents and pro-democracy activists who could be attacked at the time. The officer helped deliver malware after one of the hackers fought to compromise the email server of a Burmese human rights group.
Both defendants are not in custody, and federal officials admitted Tuesday that they are not likely to set foot in U.S. court. But the indictment has a significant symbolic and deterrent price for the Justice Department, which has made the decision that it is better to publicly denounce the behavior than to expect the most likely situation in which the defendant would go to the United States and threaten to arrest him.
Hacking began more than 10 years ago, with targets such as pharmaceutical, solar and medical device companies, as well as political dissidents, activists and clerics in the United States, China and Hong Kong, the federal government said.
The fees came here when Trump’s management officials, adding National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and Attorney General William Barr, issued public warnings about what they say are the Chinese government’s efforts to use piracy to take secrets from the lending industry for Beijing’s monetary benefit and to cover up influence U.S. policy.
Piracy is a component of what Deputy Attorney General John Demers, the Justice Decompotor’s most sensitive national security official, described as a radical effort to “steal, reflect, and replace” the generation’s progression strategy.
He also said, “China offers a haven for hackers who, as in this case, hack components for their own non-public benefit, but are willing to help the state, and are on call to do so.”
Criminal fees are the first in the Justice Department to accuse foreign hackers of attacking innovation related to coronavirus, U.S. intelligence agencies. And the West have warned for months against such efforts.
Last week, for example, the U.S. government, Canada and Britain accused a hacking organization with links to Russian intelligence for trying to run studies on the disease, which has killed more than 140,000 people in the United States and more than 600,000 worldwide. Matrix according to figures compiled through Johns Hopkins University.
The prosecution describes the hackers’ multiple efforts to spy on companies involved in the coronavirus investigation, not accusing them of good fortune in a robbery.
Prosecutors say Li networked a computer network in January at a Massachusetts biotechnology company known for seeking a possible vaccine and looked for vulnerabilities in a Maryland company’s network less than a week after the company said it was doing similar clinical work.
Li also found the networks of a California diagnostic company interested in the progression of verification kits and a state-owned antiviral drug biotechnology company.
Hacking the vaccine data is slowing down research, as the establishment will have to fight not only to resolve the breach, but also to ensure that the knowledge it has accumulated has not been altered, Demers said.
“Once it’s in your system, you can not only take the data, but also manipulate it,” Demers said. “We are so involved that there will possibly be a slowdown in the study efforts of this specific institution.”
The indictment earlier this month sent to federal court in the Eastern District of Washington, where the piracy described through prosecutors was first discovered on Hanford’s Energy Department website.
“If this can happen there, we all want to know that this can happen anywhere,” Federal Prosecutor William Hyslop said of his district.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to the accusation but noted the comments made last week through the foreign Ministry spokesman, who described China as the victim of “unfounded speculation,” but it is also a country whose clinical prowess does not. wants to ‘ensure an advantage through flight’.
Ben Buchanan, a professor at Georgetown University and “The Hacker and the State,” said that while the United States has transparently expressed its perspectives on the types of unified economic espionage, it is not transparent where the espionage line is plotting. similar to the coronavirus or the type of espionage the United States can perform.
He said he was not sure that the indictment, without other significant consequences, would cause China to stop its operations.
“The merit of spying on this is too high for many governments to ignore,” Buchanan said in an email.
_____
Associated Press Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to the report.