China issues report on U.S. CIA’s cyberattacks on other countries 

Published: May 04,2023

The Chinese authorities released a report on Thursday to reveal the cyberattacks conducted by U.S. intelligent agency toward other countries over the years.

China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and Chinese cybersecurity company Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd. jointly released an investigation report on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) cyberattacks against other countries and the consequences it led.

The cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 discovered an unknown cyberattack organization in 2020 which carried out a slew of cyberattacks toward China and other countries by utilizing cyber tools related to CIA.

Such cyberattacks can be traced back to the year of 2011, and continue to this day. The targets of such espionage actions expand to fields such as countries’ key information infrastructure, aerospace sector, scientific research institutes, petroleum industry, tech companies as well as government agencies.

The report unveils that the CIA took advantages of zero-day vulnerability, including a number of backdoors and vulnerabilities that haven’t been disclosed to the public. This was done to set up “zombie” networks to initiate springboard attacks by stages, targeting web servers, terminals, routers, as well as industrial control devices. The zero-day vulnerability are software loopholes that are discovered by attackers before the vendor has become aware of them.

In the joint investigation, the team captured a plethora of malware such as Trojan programs and plug-ins related to the CIA. All the cyberattacking weapons were strictly standardized, processed and underwent professional software engineering management, which only the CIA abides by these standards and specifications to develop cyberattack weapons.

The investigation also found that the CIA’s cyberattackes cover all networks which enables the CIA to easily steal sensitive data of other countries at any time.

CGTN