More cyberattacks come from China than the rest of the world combined, FBI head claims
China isn’t honoring agreements, FBI director claims
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China has conducted more cyberattacks against the United States of America than all of the other major nations combined, the director of the FBI has claimed.
In a speech earlier this week, Christoper Wray stated that the FBI is currently investigating more than 2,000 incidents in which China sought to “steal our information and technology”.
According to Wray, China has stolen “staggering volumes” of information from US companies and theirendpoints, causing deep, job-destroying damage in numerous industries. It has come to a point in which the FBI opens roughly two new investigations every day.
Hiring criminals
China is able to do that, Wray further added, with “a lot of funding and sophisticated tools.” What’s more, it often employs other cybercriminal groups, or as he calls them - cyber mercenaries.
Wray noted that the Chinese are also causing a lot of collateral damage along the way, mentioning the recentMicrosoftExchange hack which “compromised the networks of more than 10,000 American companies in a single campaign alone.”
Wray also accused the Chinese of not honoring their own agreements. “In 2015, the Chinese government publicly promised to stop handing hacked US technology to Chinese companies, but their cyber theft program kept going strong.” Even the China-US no-hack agreement, which was made in 2015, hasn’t stopped them from distributingmalwareacross the virtual States and wreaking havoc:
Chinese hackers attacked top telcos using Microsoft Exchange flaw>Chinese hackers are reportedly now deploying malware on targets in Russia>Chinese hackers cloned a Windows security flaw stolen from the NSA
“And in the years since, they’ve hit ever more companies and workers. We’ve seen small companies developing important medicines ransacked. We’ve seen big managed service providers remotely managing IT services for thousands of other businesses hacked, so the Chinese government could hijack their trusted connections with their customers and hack those companies, too.”
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But the US was not without a response, as well, he said, mentioning the move against Huawei. Still, he doesn’t expect the fight against China to end any time soon.
Via:The Register
Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.
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