At a glance.
- US government charges Chinese nationals for alleged ties to APT31.
- Florida cities disrupted by cyberattacks.
- Suspicious NuGet package appears to target developers in the industrial sector.
US government charges Chinese nationals for alleged ties to APT31.
The US Treasury Department has sanctioned a Chinese tech firm, the Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company, for allegedly operating as a front for the Ministry of State Security-linked threat actor APT31. Treasury also sanctioned two individuals connected to the company, Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin, for their alleged "roles in malicious cyber operations targeting U.S. entities that operate within U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, directly endangering U.S. national security."
In addition, the US Justice Department charged seven Chinese nationals, including Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin, with "conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for their involvement in a PRC-based hacking group that spent approximately 14 years targeting U.S. and foreign critics, businesses, and political officials in furtherance of the PRC’s economic espionage and foreign intelligence objectives."
The Justice Department stated, "The APT31 Group was part of a cyberespionage program run by the MSS’s Hubei State Security Department, located in the city of Wuhan. Through their involvement with the APT31 Group, since at least 2010, the defendants conducted global campaigns of computer hacking targeting political dissidents and perceived supporters located inside and outside of China, government and political officials, candidates, and campaign personnel in the United States and elsewhere, and American companies. The defendants and others in the APT31 Group targeted thousands of U.S. and foreign individuals and companies. Some of this activity resulted in successful compromises of the targets’ networks, email accounts, cloud storage accounts, and telephone call records, with some surveillance of compromised email accounts lasting many years."
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington DC told the BBC that "without valid evidence, relevant countries jumped to an unwarranted conclusion" and "made groundless accusations."