Hackers working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security broke into the networks of eight of the world’s biggest technology service providers in an effort to steal commercial secrets from their clients, sources familiar with the attacks said.
Reuters yesterday reported extensive new details about the global hacking campaign, known as Cloud Hopper and attributed to China by the US and its Western allies.
A US indictment in December last year outlined an elaborate operation to steal Western intellectual property in order to advance China’s economic interests, but stopped short of naming victim companies.
A Reuters report at the time identified two: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Co and IBM Corp.
Now, Reuters has found that at least six other technology service providers were compromised: Fujitsu Ltd, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, NTT Data Corp, Dimension Data, Computer Sciences Corp and DXC Technology Co, HPE’s spun-off services arm.
Reuters has also identified more than a dozen victims who were clients of the service providers. That list includes Swedish telecom giant Ericsson AB, US Navy shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc and travel reservation system Sabre Corp.
HPE said that it worked “diligently for our customers to mitigate this attack and protect their information.”
DXC said that it had “robust security measures in place” to protect itself and clients, neither of which have “experienced a material impact” due to Cloud Hopper.
NTT Data, Dimension Data, Tata Consultancy Services, Fujitsu and IBM declined to comment.
IBM has previously said that it has no evidence sensitive corporate data was compromised by the attacks.
Sabre said that it had disclosed a cybersecurity incident in 2015 and an investigation concluded no traveler data was accessed.
A Huntington Ingalls spokeswoman said that the company is “confident that there was no breach” of any data via HPE or DXC.
Ericsson said that it does not comment on specific cybersecurity incidents.
“While there have been attacks on our enterprise network, we have found no evidence in any of our extensive investigations that Ericsson’s infrastructure has ever been used as part of a successful attack on one of our customers,” a spokesman said.
The Chinese government has consistently denied all accusations of involvement in hacking.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said that Beijing opposed cyberenabled industrial espionage.
“The Chinese government has never in any form participated in or supported any person to carry out the theft of commercial secrets,” it said in a statement to Reuters.
The Cloud Hopper attacks carry worrying lessons for government officials and technology companies struggling to manage security threats.
Chinese hackers, including a group known as APT10, were able to continue the attacks in the face of a counteroffensive by top security specialists and despite a 2015 US-China pact to refrain from economic espionage.
Reuters was unable to detail the full extent of the damage done by the hacking and many victims were unable to tell exactly what was stolen.
Yet, senior Western intelligence officials have said that the toll was high.
“This was a sustained series of attacks with a devastating impact,” said Robert Hannigan, former director of Britain’s GCHQ signals intelligence agency and now European chairman at cybersecurity firm BlueVoyant.
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