In December 2019 Zaosong Zheng, a medical student from China, was arrested at Logan Airport for stealing 21 vials of biological research and attempting to smuggle them out of the United States aboard a flight destined for China. Zheng stated that he intended to bring the vials to China to use them to conduct research in his own laboratory and publish the results under his own name.[7] Zheng is charged with making false statements, visa fraud, acting as an agent of a foreign government, conspiracy, and smuggling goods from the United States. As of March 2020, Zheng is free on $100,000 bond.[8]
Four Chinese nationals have been charged with visa fraud. On June 7, 2020, Xin Wang was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport and charged with visa fraud. Wang, a scientific researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and officer with the People's Republic of China's (PRC) People's Liberation Army (PLA), is charged with falsifying his U.S. visa application and accused of stealing secrets from the medical researchers and sending them to a military lab in China.[15] Chen Song and Kaikai Zhao were both arrested in July 2020 for lying on their visa applications to conceal their affiliation with the PLA.[16] The FBI sought to arrest Juan Tang pursuant to an Arrest Warrant and Complaint that were filed on June 26, and unsealed on July 20. In a rare move, Tang sought refuge at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, where the Chinese government sheltered her for several weeks until she eventually left the consulate to attend a medical appointment and was arrested.[17][18]
Chinese hackers charged with stealing data from NASA, IBM, and others
Download File: https://cinurl.com/2vDVYJ
In July 2019, federal agents arrested husband and wife couple Yu Zhou, 49, and Li Chen, 46, currently of San Diego, California, for stealing medical secrets from the former employer.[97] The couple conspired to, attempted to and did steal scientific trade secrets related to exosomes and exosome isolation from Nationwide Children's Hospital's Research Institute for their own personal financial gain. The husband and wife allegedly founded a company in China in 2015 without the hospital's knowledge. While Zhou and Chen continued to be employed by Nationwide Children's, they marketed products and services related to exosome isolation through their Chinese company. In September 2019, they were charged with crimes related to stealing exosome-related trade secrets concerning the research, identification and treatment of a range of pediatric medical conditions.[98] On July 30, 2020, Li Chen pled guilty.[99] On February 1, 2021, Chen was sentenced to 30 months in prison for conspiring to steal exosome-related trade secrets concerning the research, identification and treatment of a range of pediatric medical conditions. Chen also conspired to commit wire fraud.[100]
The 21st century is regarded as the information age or the internet age. With the advancement in technology and the internet, data is made easily accessible. Some of the largest countries in the world are data-driven. For example, Ola and Uber are the largest mobility platforms, but own no vehicles; Alibaba is one of the largest retailers having no inventory; Facebook is the largest social media platform, but creates no content. With a humongous amount of information being solicited and disseminated online, a myriad of privacy and data protection concerns have arisen. In 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged two Chinese hackers for stealing information from 45 tech companies and governmental agencies, including NASA, IBM, and others. [1] Recently, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Cybersecurity also accused the Chinese hackers of trying to steal the coronavirus vaccine research. [2] Similarly, many other data breaches have occurred in the past. If such high-profile data of government agencies is not safe, then whose is?
On February 17, 2021, a federal indictment charged three North Korean computer programmers with participating in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy including conducting a series of destructive cyberattacks, stealing and extorting more than $1.3 billion of money and cryptocurrency from financial institutions and companies, creating and deploying multiple malicious cryptocurrency applications, and developing and fraudulently marketing a blockchain platform.
On February 17, 2021, a federal indictment charged three North Korean computer programmers with participating in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy including conducting a series of destructive cyberattacks, stealing and extorting more than $1.3 billion of money and cryptocurrency from financial institutions and companies, creating and deploying multiple malicious cryptocurrency applications, and developing and fraudulently marketing a blockchain platform. The suspects were believed to have been working for the North Korean military and were linked to the prolific North Korean threat group Lazarus. The trio are thought to be behind cyberattacks beginning as early as November 2014 targeting the media industry.
On November 18, 2019, the Cayman National Bank and Trust Company confirmed it had been breached and had confidential data stolen. The Cayman National Bank did not elaborate on the extent of the breach but confirmed it was working with law enforcement. This announcement corroborated an earlier claim by Phineas Fisher, a vigilante hacker persona, who publicized the hack to encourage similar hacktivism. Phineas Fisher offered $100,000 USD to hacktivists who breach and leak documents from bank, oil companies, surveillance spyware vendors, and others.
Nine people so far have been charged in the ongoing probe. A Russian national was extradited from Georgia to the United States in September 2018, although he denied that he was the central hacker in the attacks. The federal authorities in New York said the man worked with an international syndicate from 2012 to 2015 to steal customer information, which was used in numerous crimes including a spam email campaign to falsely tout stocks and shares to ramp up the price. In September 2019, he pleaded guilty to six felony charges in connection with the data breach and other cybercrimes, and he faces up to a lifetime in prison.
Toward the end of 2008, Atlanta-based credit card processing company RBS WorldPay was breached by an international crime ring. The group used sophisticated hacking techniques to break the encryption used by RBS WorldPay to protect customer data on payroll debit cards. Once bypassed, the group created counterfeit payroll debit cards and raised their account limits. The group employed a network of individuals to use the cards to withdraw over $9 million from more than 2,100 ATMs in at least 280 cities worldwide. The investigation of the incident identified over 1.5 million customers whose confidential information was compromised. Individuals in Russia, Moldova, Nigeria, and Estonia were indicted from the hack in 2009. To date, U.S. authorities have charged fourteen men.
In 2018, the US Department of Justice charged two Chinese nationals with hacking 45 companies from countries including the USA, Japan, Germany, United Arab Emirates, and Canada. The culprits were charged with stealing data from NASA, IBM, and other high-profile institutions and companies, thus jeopardizing national security.
Reminiscent of the golden days of espionage during the Cold War, cyber warfare consists primarily of gathering intelligence. According to cyber security statistics, stealing data from governments, companies, or individuals is more common than you would think, with more than a quarter of all cybercrime activities classified as espionage. Manufacturing, education, and public administration all hold invaluable data when it comes to espionage, which is why they are targeted most often.
Prosecutors charged Zhu Hua and Zhang Jianguo in hacking attacks against the U.S. Navy, the space agency NASA and the Energy Department and dozens of companies. The operation targeted intellectual property and corporate secrets to give Chinese companies an unfair competitive advantage, they said. Britain, Australia and New Zealand joined the United States in slamming China over what they called a global campaign of cyber-enabled commercial intellectual property theft, signaling growing global coordination against the practice. "No country poses a broader, more severe long-term threat to our nation's economy and cyber infrastructure than China," FBI Director Chris Wray said at a news conference. "China's goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world's leading superpower, and they're using illegal methods to get there." Five sources familiar with the attacks told Reuters the hackers breached the networks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co and IBM, then used the access to hack into their clients' computers. IBM said it had no evidence that sensitive data had been compromised. HPE said it could not comment. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other officials in President Donald Trump's administration said China's hacking effort, which U.S. officials said began in 2006 and ran through 2018, violated a 2015 agreement intended to crack down on cyber espionage for commercial purposes. Britain agreed. The campaign is "one of the most serious, strategically significant, persistent and potentially damaging set of cyber intrusions against the UK and our allies that we have seen," a British security official said. Victims included NASA's Goddard Space Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and companies involved in aviation, space and satellite technology, finance, electronics, healthcare, oil and gas exploration, according to court documents. "The list of victim companies reads like a 'Who's Who' of the global economy," Wray said. He did not name the businesses. Tensions between Washington and Beijing are high over tit-for-tat trade tariffs and after Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies, was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States. Meng was arrested on the same day the United States and China agreed to talks to resolve the trade dispute. 2ff7e9595c
Comments