Google Division Says China-Sponsored Hackers Launching Sophisticated Cyberattacks

State-sponsored hackers from China are launching increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

With these attacks targeting both government and business systems, they can evade common defenses, enter networks, remain undetected and spy on victims for years, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Thursday (March 16).

The report attributed these findings to Google’s Mandiant division, which has learned that hackers are targeting devices on the edge of networks — rather than trying to get behind a firewall, as is traditionally done — because these devices are generally not protected by antivirus or endpoint detection software, according to the report.

Mandiant has identified these attacks as being from China-based, state-sponsored hackers because of the malware code they use, the government and business victims they target, the sophistication of the attacks and the amount of resources they require, the report said.

China routinely denies that it backs such efforts, per the report.

Mandiant said in a Thursday blog post that hackers are targeting technologies that do not support endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, including firewalls, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, hypervisors and virtual private network (VPN) technologies.

“Mandiant has investigated dozens of intrusions at defense industrial base (DIB), government, technology and telecommunications organizations over the years where suspected China-nexus groups have exploited zero-day vulnerabilities and deployed custom malware to steal user credentials and maintain long-term access to the victim environments,” the company said in the blog post.

This report comes about three months after Zurich CEO Mario Greco said that cyberattacks could pose a larger threat to insurers than systemic issues like pandemics and climate change.

“What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber,” Greco told the Financial Times on Dec. 26. “What if someone takes control of vital parts of our infrastructure, the consequences of that?”

The WSJ report also comes about four months after South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem banned the use of TikTok on state devices, saying that the social media platform gathers data on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“South Dakota will have no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations who hate us,” Noem said at the time. “The Chinese Communist Party uses information that it gathers on TikTok to manipulate the American people, and they gather data off the devices that access the platform.”