Chinese hackers have India as their prime target
Monday, 22nd June 2020
Several hacking groups with links to China are making Indian government agencies, media houses, telecom operators, pharmaceutical companies, etc. their target for cyberattack, as per intelligence gathered from cyber firm Cyfirma from various un-indexed forums as well as a US based cybersecurity firm FireEye.
Since the past four years, India has been under constant threat from Chinese-based hackers and ranks sixth in the target list after US, South Korea, Hong Kong, Germany and Japan.
A Hunan-based cyber activist, Zuola, who has been under persistent cyber threats for writing about the government, said that a cyber army has essentially three categories of targets- activists that need crushing, foreign business companies and governments. Zuola himself has been getting advanced persistent threat (APT) which India is also possibly facing from China as per Indian intelligence agencies.
Earlier in 2013, FireEye had detected a Chinese military cyber espionage unit named APT1 that would access a victim’s network for an average of 356 days, the longest being at least 1,764 days. Among the targets, Indian IT, aerospace and public administration featured frequently.
Some of the other most active groups include APT41, APT40, APT10 and APT19, which target several countries including India and attack legal bodies, investment firms, etc. A fifth group called APT30, which is known to have collected intelligence from India and other southeast Asian countries, operated for a decade till 2015. However, it cannot be ascertained whether it is still active.
Although India has been under constant threat and attack from Chinese based cyber espionage networks that have weakened government systems, Zuola states that the CCP’s aim is actually to gain advantages through “propaganda, disinformation, bribery, infiltration”, etc. To that end, they depend on generations of hackers, whom they have termed as the nation’s “precious wealth”.
He disclosed that government appointed hackers are never full-time workers. They act as “consultants” who are engaged to provide solutions for specific needs of the government. The work under the garb of “engineers, systems engineers, software developers, project managers or academic researchers” and unless they work remotely in an overseas company, they don’t hide the fact that they are working for the government.
Source: Times of India