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.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
RSS