China is not a friend to the United States. They are, at best, a rival; at worst, an adversary. They are, in fact, the United States' primary geopolitical rival, current actions against Iran notwithstanding. They, and maybe Russia, are the only nations that could engage the United States in a near-peer conflict.
As further evidence of this, we note that Chinese hackers have regularly tried to gain access to American business and government systems, and in some cases, have succeeded. Not this time; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has now seized several domains used by a Chinese state-sponsored group to try to gain access to American systems including NASA and the United States Senate.
Federal law enforcement has seized core infrastructure reportedly used by a Chinese state-sponsored cyber platform to target high-profile U.S. government entities and critical infrastructure in a campaign dating back to 2018.
Authorities said the hacking targets varied from NASA to the Federal Reserve.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI last week announced the court-authorized domain seizures targeting QScan and QTRouter, two cyber platforms that investigators said have ties to a Chinese group known as QTFY.
Officials announcing the seizures included U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon for the Southern District of California, as well as Special Agent in Charge Mark Remily of the FBI San Diego Field Office.
The Federal Reserve and NASA are both critical systems, and one would expect their own cybersecurity to be pretty good, but these things are frequently virtual arms races; the hackers develop new tools, and the targets develop new counters. The problem is that the target agencies and organizations are forced to react; with this move, it looks like the FBI is being proactive, seizing one means by which these Chinese hackers are finding their way into American networks.
Although, honestly, one would think that NASA and the Federal Reserve in particular would have their most critical systems air-gapped, which would prevent any possibility of anyone gaining access without being physically present.
Authorities said QTFY worked through Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Co. to provide hacking services to Chinese intelligence and military arms.
Among QTFY's targets were NASA, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. departments of Energy, Justice, and Health and Human Services, as well as the U.S. Senate.
According to court filings, the platforms infected thousands of devices worldwide to construct an obfuscation network that masked attack origins. Federal agents reportedly neutralized both tools by seizing hard-coded domains essential for the malware's communication.
This is some Cold War-level stuff, right here.
Here's the thing: This is, almost certainly, not the only case in which Chinese-sponsored hackers are trying to gain access to American systems. In this case, NASA, the Federal Reserve, and even the United States Senate were among the targets, but it's almost certain that other groups are working to gain access to the Pentagon, the White House, Homeland Security, and even the FBI itself. And it's not at all unreasonable to call this for what it is: A state-sponsored effort. Nothing much happens in the Middle Kingdom without the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) signing off on it, or at the least, being aware of it. The CCP is probing the United States on multiple fronts; they are conducting cyber-attacks, they are doing reconnaissance fly-overs of American territory via high-altitude balloons, Chinese interests are buying up American farmlands suspiciously near American military bases, and Chinese nationals are even operating clandestine biological laboratories. The numbers of Chinese nationals attempting to enter the United States illegally spiked under Joe Biden, and we don't really have a good number of how many are present now, except that it's in five digits, at the very least.
This latest cyber-shutdown was good news, but this is a skirmish in a much larger online conflict; and the one thing we should hold out hope for is that we are doing it to them, too.
You can view the FBI's original application for seizure warrants here.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are once again respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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