A Chinese security technology company was able to breach foreign governments, infiltrate social media accounts and hack into personal computers, a massive data leak analyzed by experts revealed this week.
The trove of documents from I-Soon, a private contractor that competed for Chinese government contracts, shows its hackers breached more than a dozen governments, according to cybersecurity firms SentinelLabs and Malwarebytes.
I-Soon also breached “democracy organizations” in China’s semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong, universities and the NATO military alliance, SentinelLabs researchers wrote Wednesday.
The leaked data, the content of which AFP could not immediately identify, was posted last week to the online software repository GitHub by an unknown person.
“The leak provides some of the most concrete details seen publicly to date, revealing the maturation of China’s cyberespionage ecosystem,” SentinelLabs analysts said.
TSMC diversifies out of hotspot Taiwan with new factory in Japan
I-Soon was able to breach government offices in India, Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, among others, Malwarebytes said in a separate post on Wednesday.
I-Soon’s website was unavailable Thursday morning, although an online file snapshot of the website from Tuesday said it is based in Shanghai, with subsidiaries and offices in Beijing, Sichuan, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
It contains files showing chatlogs, presentations and target lists, the analysts said.
The services offered to potential customers included hacking into a person’s account on social media platform X — monitoring their activity, reading their private messages and posting.
It also showed how the company’s hackers could access and take over a person’s computer remotely, allowing them to execute commands and monitor what they type.
Other services included ways to hack the iPhone and other Apple smartphone operating systems, as well as custom hardware — including a powerbank that can extract data from a device and send it to hackers.
‘It’s scary’: YouTubers split over OpenAI’s video tool Sora
The leak also showed I-Soon bidding for contracts in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, where Beijing is accused of detaining hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslims as part of a campaign against alleged extremism. The United States has called it genocide.
“The company listed other terrorism-related targets that the company had hacked in the past as evidence of their ability to carry out these tasks, including targeting counter-terrorism centers in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” SentinelLabs analysts said.
The leaked data also revealed the fees the hackers could earn, they said — including $55,000 from breaking into a government ministry in Vietnam.
The FBI said China has the largest hacking program of any country.
Beijing dismissed the allegations as “baseless” and pointed to the United States’ history of cyber espionage.
Pieter Arntz, a researcher at Malwarebytes, said the leak will likely “rattle a few cages in the compromised entities.”
Germany cuts growth forecast for 2024 as economic woes pile up
“Therefore, it could potentially cause a shift in international diplomacy and expose the holes in the national security of many countries.”
Source: AFP