FBI announced the search for Chinese citizens from the group APT1

Last winter, we wrote about the report of the American company Mandiant (now part of FireEye), which is dedicated to the Chinese group APT1 (aka Comment Crew ). This conditional name received a group of hackers from the so-called. PLA Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army of China, which was engaged in cyber espionage operations on the territory of other states. For these operations, various types of malware were used: backdoors, remote access tools (RAT), rootkits, and Trojans. As a rule, the victim was infected through social engineering methods, sending fake messages to the corporate email addresses of employees.



A few days ago, the US Department of Justice published the text of the indictment in which defendants (Chinese citizens, employees of the PLA Unit 61398) were charged with such crimes as: unauthorized entry into computer systems (computer hacking), and theft of information from organizations USA. Compromised organizations belong to such industries as nuclear energy and the metallurgical industry. The US authorities were outraged by the fact that espionage was carried out to obtain the strategic advantage of Chinese companies in the market due to the theft of technology from American companies.
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This is the first such case of accusation of specific Chinese citizens in computer espionage by US law enforcement agencies. Persons on the wanted list link .