US and allies accuse China of global hacking spree

o Beijing says accusation ‘fabricated’ for political goals

WASHINGTON: The United States and its allies accused China on Monday of a global cyber espionage campaign, mustering an unusually broad coalition of countries for an initiative angrily rejected by Beijing.

The United States was joined by Nato, the European Union, Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan and New Zealand in condemning the spying, which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said posed “a major threat to our economic and national security”.

Simultaneously, the Department of Justice charged four China nationals – three security officials and one contract hacker – with targeting dozens of companies, universities and government agencies in the US and abroad.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the accusation was “fabricated out of thin air” for political goals.

“China will absolutely not accept this,” he told a regular news conference in Beijing yesterday.

China does not engage in cyber attacks, and the technical details Washington has provided “do not constitute a complete chain of evidence”, he said.

While a flurry of statements from Western powers represents a broad alliance, cyber experts said the lack of consequences for China beyond the US indictment was conspicuous.

Just a month ago, summit statements by G7 and Nato warned China and said it posed threats to the international order.

Adam Segal, a cyber security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, called Monday’s announcement a “successful effort to get friends and allies to attribute the action to Beijing, but not very useful without any concrete follow-up”.

Some of Monday’s statements even seemed to pull punches.

While Washington and its close allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada held the Chinese state directly responsible for the hacking, others were more circumspect.

Nato merely said its members “acknowledge” the allegations being leveled against Beijing by the US, Canada and Britain.

The EU said it was urging Chinese officials to rein in “malicious cyber activities undertaken from its territory” – a statement that left open the possibility that the Chinese government was itself innocent of directing the espionage.

The US was much more specific, formally attributing intrusions such as the one that affected servers running Microsoft Exchange earlier this year to hackers affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security.

Microsoft had already blamed China.