Chinese hackers back at work

U.S. corporations being hit again after yearslong hiatus

WASHINGTON — After a hiatus of a few years, Chinese state hackers are once again penetrating networks at U.S. corporations in a campaign to steal secrets and leapfrog ahead in a race for global technology supremacy, cyber researchers say.

Companies in fields such as biomedicine, robotics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence have all been hit by cyber intrusions originating in China, the researchers say.

“It’s definitely accelerating. The trend is up,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, cofounder and chief technology officer at Crowd-Strike, a threat intelligence firm based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Chinese state hacking teams linked to the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security are becoming visible on U.S. networks again, although they are using new methods to remain undetected, researchers said.

“In the last few months, we’ve definitely seen … a re-emergence of groups that had appeared to have gone dormant for a while,” said Cristiana Brafman Kittner, principal analyst at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm that has tracked Chinese hacking extensively.

The activity comes after a sharp drop in Chinese hacking that began in September 2015, when then-President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached an agreement to end the hacking theft of commercial secrets. The agreement quelled U.S. anger over its charge that China is the “world’s most active and persistent perpetrator of economic espionage.”

U.S. prosecutors in 2014 indicted five PLA officers for economic espionage for hacking into firms including Westinghouse, U.S. Steel and Alcoa. The 56-page indictment said the five men worked for Unit 61398 of the PLA’s Third Department in Shanghai. The highly detailed complaint entered details that U.S. officials later said were meant to “name and shame” China for commercial hacking.

Why China’s hackers may be getting back into the game is not clear. Renewed trade tensions may be a reason. President Donald Trump has threatened to impose $50 billion of tariffs on Chinese-made products to cut the U.S. trade deficit of $375 billion with China.