China accuses CIA of stealing data for 11 years

Cybersecurity company Qihoo 360 accused the CIA of hacking into many agencies in China. Illustrative photo

The WikiLeaks “Vault 7” document series shocked the world when it revealed the CIA’s covert operations. In a report recently published in both English and Chinese, Qihoo-360 said that a hacker group codenamed APT-C-39 was confirmed to be a member of the CIA. This hacker group began carrying out attacks in September 2008, focusing mainly on targets in Beijing, Guangdong and Zhejiang. The US spies penetrated the networks of organizations in the fields of civil aviation, scientific research, energy - petroleum, the internet and even Chinese government agencies.

Qihoo-360 points out that the cyber weapons used by APT-C-39 are almost identical to those revealed by WikiLeaks in the “Vault 7” document series on CIA covert operations, especially some CIA-exclusive weapons such as Fluxwire and Grasshopper. The control commands and encryption schemes of APT-C-39 are also the same as in this document, and are set to work with Chinese hours. CIA programmer Joshua Schulte was charged with leaking the documents and is currently on trial for espionage in the US.

Qi-Anxin, another Chinese cybersecurity firm, also accused the CIA of stealing data from Chinese companies, especially in the aviation sector, in September 2019. Qi-Anxin's research was also based on WikiLeaks' "Vault 7" document set.

Neither the CIA nor the Chinese Embassy in the US has commented on the Qihoo-360 report. However, analysts say that the US, like many other countries, including China, rarely comments on cyberattack allegations. Meanwhile, many documents have been published showing that both the US and China are conducting cyberattacks against their opponents. The timing of Qihoo's report may be related to the accusations the US made last month, which clearly stated that four Chinese military hackers had carried out large-scale attacks on US credit rating organizations./.