China-affiliated cyberattacks against Taiwan jumped in the 24 hours before Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections on Jan. 13, a report released on Tuesday by US cybersecurity firm Trellix found.
The report titled Cyberattack on Democracy: Escalating Cyber Threats Immediately Ahead of Taiwan’s 2024 Presidential Election said that malicious cyberactivity targeting Taiwan had jumped from 1,758 detections on Jan. 11 to more than 4,300 on Jan. 12.
The reason behind the activity and its success remains to be determined, the report said.
Photo: Reuters
Most of the attacks focused on internal communications in government offices, police department networks across Taiwan, and billing and insurance information from financial institutes, the report said.
The activity dropped noticeably to just more than 1,000 detections on election day, it said.
Trellix manager of intelligence analysis Anne An, who wrote the report, told Voice of America: “We see a lot of Chinese APTs [advanced persistent threat actors] that, after they get in, they stay low, maintain persistence... We don’t see this crazy spike.”
“The pattern of the attack is unusual,” she added.
An told Voice of America that Trellix is still looking into the issue, adding that a possible explanation was that Chinese threat actors were desperate to find any means possible to influence the elections at the last moment.
The Trellix report said that the surge in attacks the day before the elections are likely only part of China’s long-term strategy to threaten and attack Taiwan.
Separately, the European External Action Service (EEAS) on Jan. 23 released its 2nd EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats report indicating that China was behind a slew of disinformation campaigns to drive a wedge between the US and Taiwan.
EEAS spokesman Peter Stano on Tuesday last week said that one attempt to slander outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) involved a 300-page electronic book published on X and other Web sites.
On April 6 last year, China’s state-run Global Times published illustrations insinuating that the US was using Tsai as a pawn, walking her toward a cliff, the report said, adding that the illustrations were later disseminated via social media.
Another article by state-run Chinese agencies falsely claimed that 30 Taiwanese political groups protested Tsai’s visit to the US, it said.
While the report said that it found very little use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology among the 750 incidents it reviewed, Taiwan AI Labs (台灣人工智慧實驗室) in January issued an analytic report saying that generative AI and large language models are being used heavily in disinformation campaigns.
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