A Chinese IT provider was able to infiltrate foreign governments, social media accounts and personal computers, according to a major leak of company data studied by experts.
I-Soon, a private company contracted by the Chinese government, infiltrated the systems of more than a dozen governments, pro-democracy organizations in Hong Kong, as well as NATO, analysts at SentinelLabs and Malwarebytes say. two cybersecurity companies.
The I-Soon data was posted on February 16 on the GitHub sharing site.
They contain chat files, presentations and target lists, according to analysts. AFP was not immediately able to verify its contents.
“The leak provides some of the most concrete details made public to date” about China’s alleged spying and reveals its “maturity,” wrote in a SentinelLabs report published Wednesday.
The hacker and his motives are unknown, but the leak “provides unprecedented insight into the internal operations of a state-affiliated hacking service provider,” according to SentinelLabs.
I-Soon was notably able to infiltrate government institutions in India, Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, according to another report published Wednesday by Malwarebytes.
I-Soon offered to take control of an account on the social network
They also explain how I-Soon hackers can access and take control of a person’s computer remotely, allowing them to execute commands and monitor what they type.
I-Soon also offered to hack phone operating systems, including Apple’s iPhone, or illegally extract data via an external battery.
According to the leaked documents, I-Soon served as a contractor for the Chinese government in the Xinjiang region (northwest China), where the authorities have imposed draconian measures in the name of anti-terrorism for more than a decade.
Western studies, based on interpretations of official Chinese documents, testimonies of alleged victims and statistical extrapolations, accuse the authorities of repression against the Uyghurs, one of the indigenous minorities of Xinjiang.
China did not immediately respond to the espionage allegations. But she regularly condemns these types of accusations, saying she herself is the victim of numerous cyberattacks from the United States.
