On January 31, 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray announcement that China was the country from which the most cyberattacks targeting the United States originated. Indeed, nearly 2,000 of the incidents analyzed by the federal service were considered to be real attempts by the Chinese government to steal American information and technology.
Many cyberattacks orchestrated by China in order to extract as much information as possible
Christopher Wray does not hesitate to directly implicate Beijing in a sector, cyberspace, where the attribution of the perpetrators of an operation is nevertheless complex, ” The Chinese government is stealing huge volumes of information, causing profound damage and thereby destroying jobs in many industrial sectors – so much so that we are putting in place, approximately every 12 hours, new procedures to counter their intelligence operations “. The FBI considers that China launches cyberattacks larger and more dangerous than all major countries combined.
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” China employs cybercriminals who have many sophisticated tools, use various and varied methods “, adds the director of the FBI. By hacking on a large scale, the damage caused by these cyberattacks is random, but this technique makes it possible to obtain a very large amount of data and thus, hope to obtain the information that cybercriminals want to obtain.
This is typically what happened with the Microsoft Exchange hack in 2021, where the EU, NATO and the US singled out China as one. During this attack, more than 10,000 American businesses were affected. In 2020, the US Department of Justice directly accused two hackers of stealing sensitive National Security information worth hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves and Beijing. Similar accusations abound.
In July the FBI requested information against two Chinese hackers. Credit: US Department of Justice
The FBI tries to best fight against Chinese cyberattacks
In his speech, Christopher Wray insisted that China’s actions were hurting the US economy and his own businesses, ” We could totally cooperate with the Chinese government if they were responsible. We could crack down on cybercriminals, stop money launderers, reduce opioid overdose deaths. But at the FBI, we focus on the reality of the Chinese government today. clarifies Wray.
In this virtual war, the FBI is just as likely to be targeted as any American institution. In November 2021, a hacker managed to obtain an FBI email account and sent nearly 100,000 emails with it. Fortunately for the “office”, the hacker had not been able to access personal data or information on his network.
A few days before the start of the Olympics, Christopher Wray advised American athletes and their companions not to use their personal cell phones and to obtain disposable devices, “ it is important for Olympic participants to be vigilant and maintain best practices in their networks and digital environments “. The cyberwar has already begun.