A shocking data leak has blown the lid off China’s secret cyber spying operation, which has targeted countries like the UK, India, and Taiwan.
The leak, which was posted on a website for computer geeks, reveals how a shady Chinese firm called I-Soon has been helping the communist regime to hack into the phones, emails and social media accounts of millions of people around the world.
The leak contains hundreds of files, including emails, chats, photos and documents, that show how I-Soon has been working with the Chinese government for eight years, snooping on at least 20 foreign governments and territories.
The files show how I-Soon’s hackers have stolen massive amounts of data from their victims, including:
- 95 gigabytes of immigration records from India
- 3 terabytes of phone calls from South Korea
- 459 gigabytes of road maps from Taiwan
The leak also shows how I-Soon has been spying on China’s people such as protesters in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
I-Soon has been using:
- Remote Access Trojans (RATs) that can take over any operating system, including Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android
- Android attack code that can steal messages from Chinese chat apps and Telegram
- Malicious power banks that can secretly upload data from people’s systems
I-Soon’s website has mysteriously disappeared, but it used to claim that it was a cyber security company that provided digital intelligence solutions since 2010.
Google’s Mandiant Intelligence analyst John Hultquist confirmed that the leak was genuine and said that I-Soon was part of a network of contractors that had links to the Chinese patriotic hacking scene, which started 20 years ago and has since gone legit.
He guessed the leak could have come from a rival spy agency, a fed-up insider, or a competing contractor.
The Chinese government has denied any knowledge of the leak.
In a blog post, Malwarebytes said that the leak would cause a lot of trouble for the infiltrated entities and could change international relations and expose the gaps in the national security of several countries.
