US to expose China’s ‘malicious cyber activities’ after threat to economic, national security

Washington [US], July 19 (ANI): The United States, along with its allies, has decided to expose the People’s Republic of China’s pattern of “malicious cyber activities” and take further action to counter it.

In a statement on Sunday (local time), the senior administration officials said: “Tomorrow, the US and our allies and partners are exposing further details of the PRC’s pattern of malicious cyber activities and taking further action to counter it, as it poses a major threat to the US and allies’ economic and national security.”

In the announcement which will be made tomorrow morning at 7 am (local time), there will be three things including — an unprecedented group of allies and partners (the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and NATO) will be joining the US in exposing and criticising the PRC’s Ministry of State Security’s malicious cyber activities.

This is the first time NATO has condemned PRC cyber activities, the officials said via Teleconference. “We will show how the PRC’s MSS — Ministry of State Security — uses criminal contract hackers to conduct unsanctioned cyber operations globally, including for their own personal profit. Their operations include criminal activities, such as cyber-enabled extortion, crypto-jacking, and theft from victims around the world for financial gain,” the officials said.

Second, the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation — NSA, CISA, and FBI — will expose over 50 tactics, techniques, and procedures Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors used when targeting US and allied networks, along with advice for technical mitigations to confront this threat.

Third, the United States government, alongside our allies and partners, will formally attribute the malicious cyber campaign utilising the zero-day vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Exchange Server disclosed in March — a number of months ago — to malicious cyber actors affiliated with the MSS with high confidence.

Apart from that, tomorrow’s actions will be an example of how we continue to build on the progress made from the President’s first foreign trip. From the G7 and EU commitments around ransomware, to NATO adopting a new cyber defense policy for the first time in seven years, we’re putting forward a common cyber approach with our allies and laying down clear expectations on how responsible nations behave in cyberspace, they added.

In order to protect the American people and interests, the US government announced in April that it conducted cyber operations and pursued proactive network defense actions to prevent systems compromised through the Exchange Server vulnerabilities from being used for ransomware attacks or other malicious purposes.

It also announced earlier that we identified additional vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Exchange Server software and immediately shared them with the company to facilitate the development and release of patches to minimize systemic risk. (ANI)