In the first incident of its kind, an officer of the Chinese intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), is in US custody facing hacking charges. Yanjun Xu, a Deputy Division Director in MSS’s Jiangsu State Security Department, Sixth Bureau, was apprehended by Belgian authorities in April and extradited to the US on Tuesday. The US Department of Justice says he'll be tried for "conspiring and attempting to commit economic espionage and steal trade secrets from multiple U.S. aviation and aerospace companies."

Some observers suggest that the arrest, trial, and extradition of a Chinese intelligence officer will prompt strong Chinese retaliation in cyberspace. Perhaps it already has: US officials this week have been naming China as the principal cyber threat, worse than Russia, which is itself pretty bad.

Bloomberg's report of a large-scale Chinese seeding attack on the hardware supply chain has yet to find much corroboration. Bloomberg itself cited a Maryland security firm willing to say that it had found the malicious chips said to be in Supermicro motherboards, but it can't (because of nondisclosure agreements) say where it found them. NSA's Rob Joyce is the latest official to cast doubt on the report. Congress is pushing its own investigation.

Recorded Future contrasts the Russian and Chinese hacking communities, respectively "thieves and geeks."

TASS is authorized to state that Russia strongly denies having hacked the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare. They were framed, Moscow says, by Dutch security services, probably in cahoots with their Anglo-American masters.