Network security specialists claim that a hacker group working for China’s Ministry of State Security hacked the networks of eight of the world’s largest technology service providers for the purpose of stealing confidential information and their business customers’ data.
News agency Reuters has provided some details
about this international hacking campaign, dubbed by experts as Cloud Hopper,
attributed to China
by the U.S. and its allied countries’ administrations.
The report mentions that, in December 2018, the
U.S. government detected an operation to illegally extract the intellectual
property of Western companies to favor Chinese companies. Network security
experts say large organizations such as IBM
and HP have been impacted by this campaign.
According to Reuters, at least six other major
tech companies, Fujitsu, Tata Consultancy Services, NTT Data, Dimension Data,
Computer Sciences Corporation and DXC Technology, have been attacked by
hackers.
The news agency also mentioned that at least
twelve business clients of these companies have been affected. Victims include
Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson, Huntington Ingalls (U.S. naval
contractor) and Sabre, a booking agency.
In this regard, an HP spokesperson mentioned,
“We have contacted our customers to implement mitigations against this
attack and protect sensitive information”. For its part, DXC claims to
have the best computer security practices, so none of its customers have been
affected by this campaign. The rest of the companies mentioned by Reuters have
not commented yet.
On the other hand, China’s government has
denied such allegations, claiming that they are against any cyber intrusion
activity for industrial espionage purposes. “China has never been part of
any campaign for the theft of trade secrets”, China’s Foreign Ministry
says.
Network security specialists from the
International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) mention that the full scope of
this campaign is still unknown, and because of an attachment to ongoing
research, impacted companies cannot share the entire relevant information,
however, the number of victims is estimated to be much higher than has been
confirmed so far.
