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26 September 2023

China accuses U.S. of hacking Huawei servers since 2009

CHENG TING-FANG and CISSY ZHOU

TAIPEI/HONG KONG -- China has accused the U.S. of continuously hacking Huawei's servers and conducting cyberattacks to steal other critical data since 2009, the latest salvo between Beijing and Washington as tensions further escalate.

China's Ministry of State Security on Wednesday released a post on its official WeChat account titled "Revealing key despicable methods by U.S. intelligence agencies in cyberespionage and theft."

The post explicitly points to U.S. government efforts against Chinese national tech champion Huawei Technologies. It also accuses Washington of having big, influential tech companies install backdoors in software, applications and equipment so it can steal vital data from countries including China and Russia.

"In 2009, the Office of Tailored Access Operations started to infiltrate servers at Huawei's headquarters and continued conducting such surveillance operations," the post says.

The U.S. Department of State has yet to respond to a request for comment.

As geopolitical tensions mount, the U.S. and China have been expanding their global spying operations. The Wall Street Journal in July reported that Beijing-linked hackers had accessed the email account of the U.S. ambassador to China in an operation that is believed to have exposed hundreds of emails.

Wednesday's post says China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center extracted spyware called Second Date while investigating a cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an that reportedly occurred last year. The ministry found that Second Date is "cyberespionage malware developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, which operates covertly in thousands of networks in many countries around the world."

Second Date was extracted with the help from Qihoo 360, a Chinese company that releases findings about U.S. hacking activities against China from time to time, according to state broadcaster CCTV. But Qihoo 360 didn't report the part about Huawei, people familiar with the matter told Nikkei Asia.

"The U.S. had obtained control over tens of thousands of devices and stolen a substantial amount of high-value data," the ministry said.

In the past two months, Chinese state media including CCTV and Xinhua have repeatedly called the U.S. "a true empire of hackers," citing the alleged attack on Northwestern Polytechnical University. Mao Ning of China's Foreign Ministry last week cited media reports in saying Beijing has noticed Apple's iPhones could have data security issues.

Meanwhile, China has ratcheted up its attempts to target spies by revising its anti-espionage law to place a greater focus on preventing cyberattacks against government agencies and key infrastructure. A violation could lead to life in prison.

China has advised staff from central and local governmental authorities and employees of state-owned companies not to use iPhones and to stop bringing AirPods and Apple Watches to work, Nikkei has reported.

Huawei, which is on a U.S. trade blacklist and is viewed as a national security threat by Washington, recently launched several new 5G smartphones despite U.S. export controls cutting off the company's access to vital chips. The release of the handsets and Huawei's efforts to bring back its own 5G chipset from local suppliers is viewed by many industry executives as a countermove to fight the U.S. clampdown.

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