US charges three Chinese for hacking corporations

The United States Justice Department today indicted three Chinese nationals for hacking American corporations, including Moody's Analytics and Siemens AG, for commercial advantages.

Wu Yingzhuo, Dong Hao and Xia Lei conspired to hack private corporate entities to maintain unauthorised access to, and steal sensitive internal documents and communications from those entities' computers, federal prosecutors alleged.

For one victim, information that the defendants targeted and stole between December 2015 and March 2016 contained trade secrets, the Department of Justice said.

"Defendants Wu, Dong and Xia launched coordinated and targeted cyber intrusions against businesses operating in the United States, including here in the Western District of Pennsylvania, in order to steal confidential business information," said Acting US Attorney Soo C Song for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

He said, "These conspirators masked their criminal conspiracy by exploiting unwitting computers, called 'hop points', conducting 'spearphish' email campaigns to gain unauthorised access to corporate computers, and deploying malicious code to infiltrate the victim computer networks." Among the victims were Moody's Analytics, Siemens AG and Trimble.

The conspiracy began as early as 2011 and continued to May 2017.

(This article has not been edited by Zeebiz editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)