Australia joins Western assault on Chinese IP theft

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Via the AFR:

The Morrison government has joined foreign allies to blast China’s “huge” state-sponsored hacking attacks against Australian and other global companies.

Alastair MacGibbon, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre at the Australian Signals Directorate in Canberra, said potentially thousands of companies including Australian firms using outsourced technology providers had suffered cyber attacks from APT10, a group acting on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

“This is audacious,” Mr MacGibbon said on ABC Radio on Friday morning. “This is huge.”

More at WaPo:

The charges, made by US and British authorities, allege a Chinese hacking group known as APT-10 led the two-year effort against the west and allies such as Japan, which included targeting 45 American technology companies, more than 100,000 US navy personnel, and computers belonging to Nasa.

The US justice department charged two Chinese nationals — Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong — with conducting the attacks on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the country’s main intelligence service.

In a co-ordinated offensive led by Washington, Rod Rosenstein, US deputy attorney-general, said the two Chinese defendants were part of a group that had targeted at least a dozen countries in an effort that “gave China’s intelligence service access to sensitive business information”.

The Chinese hackers are accused of stealing technology related to a host of industries, including aviation, satellites, factory automation, finance and consumer electronics.

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The hollowing out of Chinese technology companies gathers pace.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.