Yahoo Finance 'Chinese hackers' target UK tech firm in Covid-19 research spree
Chinese hackers broke into a British artificial intelligence startup in April, as part of a wider cyber campaign targeting coronavirus research, the United States has claimed.
Washington officials have charged two Chinese nationals with hacking “hundreds” of victims around the world to gain access to companies’ intellectual property.
Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi, former classmates at an electrical engineering college in Chengdu, China, illicitly accessed the corporate networks of an unnamed “UK artificial intelligence and cancer research firm” in April this year, according to court documents published on Tuesday.
The pair are accused of a decade-long spree of industrial espionage, including stealing software source code and designs for weapons and other manufactured items.
They allegedly accessed details of Chinese dissidents and sympathisers with the Hong Kong democracy protests as recently as June, by spying on an unspecified "UK messaging app frequently used by Hong Kong protestors".
But they recently switched focus to looking for coronavirus research, targeting testing kit manufacturers and biotech companies working on Covid-19 treatments and vaccines, Washington claimed.
Victims were located in several different countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and Sweden.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “The UK has identified a range of cyber activity over the last few months in which malicious cyber actors sought to exploit the coronavirus pandemic for their own selfish and destructive ends. We’ve been clear that it is completely unacceptable to target those working to defeat coronavirus.”
Assistant Attorney John Demers, the US Justice Department’s national security chief, said: “China has now taken its place, alongside Russia, Iran and North Korea, in that shameful club of nations that provide a safe haven for cyber criminals in exchange for those criminals being ‘on call’ to work for the benefit of the state, here to feed the Chinese Communist party’s insatiable hunger for American and other non-Chinese companies’ hard-earned intellectual property, including COVID-19 research.”
In May, the FBI warned that Chinese government-backed hackers were attempting to steal Covid-19 research, adding that the theft “jeopardises the delivery of secure, effective, and efficient treatment options".
Last week Downing Street revealed that Oxford and Imperial scientists working on a vaccine were targeted in a "despicable" attack on behalf of the Russian government.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab alleged that APT29, a group also known as Cozy Bear was responsible, but did not say whether any useful information was stolen. The group was linked to the hacking of Democrat email accounts ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
