Chinese firm hacked Indian, foreign govts for 8 years to extract highly sensitive data: Report

I-Soon office building in Chengdu in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province. AP.

China has been carrying out hacking activities against India and other foreign governments for over eight years to access and extract highly sensitive data.

A trove of documents that includes more than 570 files, images and chat logs, leaked from a Chinese state-linked hacking group, shows how Beijing’s intelligence and military groups have been carrying out systematic cyber intrusions against at least 20 foreign governments, companies and infrastructure at a large scale.

China has now put its police on the task of investigating how these sensitive documents were leaked online and finding out who the leak is.

Target Countries

According to a report by The Washington Post, the leaked documents show contracts to extract foreign data over eight years and describe targets within at least 20 foreign governments and territories, including India, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Taiwan and Malaysia.

It includes hundreds of pages of contracts, marketing presentations, product manuals, and client and employee lists.

The leaked documents show, in detail, the methods used by Chinese authorities to keep a hawk eye on dissidents overseas, hack other nations and promote pro-Beijing narratives on social media. Meanwhile, hackers claim that they are able to find gaps in secured systems because of vulnerabilities in software of US-based companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple.

The documents also give an unusual glimpse inside the intense competition in China’s national security data-gathering industry. Officials from the police, military and several intelligence agencies in China, get comprehensive access to government contracts and other sensitive information of other nations

How it All Started?

The leaked documents come from I-Soon (also known as Auxun), a Chinese company headquartered in Shanghai.

I-Soon has ties to the powerful Ministry of Public Security and deals in selling third-party hacking and data-gathering services to Chinese government bureaus, security groups and state-owned enterprises.

Interestingly, the leaked documents don’t have any mention of the data extracted from Chinese hacking operations but lists out targets and summaries of sample data amounts extracted and details on whether the hackers obtained full or partial control of foreign systems.

The documents show I-Soon hacking networks across Central and Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.

When These Documents Were Leaked?

The leaked documents from I-Soon were posted to GitHub last week and are being considered credible by cybersecurity experts.

As per a report in the Associated Press, Chinese state agents have been using hacking tools to get into the social media accounts of users outside China on platforms such as X (previously Twitter), and also break into emails They have also been found to hide the online activity of people overseas.

The report also describes devices disguised as power strips and batteries, which can be used to compromise Wi-Fi networks.

Among the documents, was a spreadsheet that listed the 80 overseas targets that I-Soon hackers have been successful in breaching apparently.

The haul included 95.2 gigabytes of immigration data from India and a collection of 3 terabyte worth of call log data from South Korea’s LG U Plus telecom provider. The documents also showed that I-Soon had a sample of 459 gigabytes of road-mapping data from Taiwan, the island nation of 23 million that China claims as its territory.

The group also targeted other telecommunications firms in Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal and Taiwan.

It is worth mentioning that I-Soon has joined the Chinese police in their investigation to find out how the files were leaked.

AP quoted an employee of I-Soon saying that the company held a meeting Wednesday about the leak, in which they were told it wouldn’t affect business too much and asked them to “continue working as normal.”

One of the spreadsheets showed that I-Soon has signed hundreds of deals with Chinese police that range from small jobs priced at $1,400 to multiyear contracts costing as much as $800,000.

With inputs from agencies