China has accused a hacker group they allege is backed by Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party of orchestrating cyberattacks on up to 1,000 sensitive mainland networks
The South China Morning Post reports:
The claim was made public on May 20 by the Guangzhou city police, who said the group used “rudimentary and crude” methods to launch widespread attacks from overseas IP addresses, including from the United States, France and Japan.
The city’s Tianhe district Public Security Bureau said the group was behind a recent incident in which a local tech company was targeted in Guangzhou, in the southern province of Guangdong. The bureau said technical analysis traced the attack to the alleged Taiwan-based group.
“The hackers deployed phishing emails, exploited public vulnerabilities, conducted brute-force password attacks and used low-grade Trojan horse programs to carry out the attacks,” the police said.
Police also said the group had ramped up its activity significantly over the past year, describing its actions as “malicious sabotage” aimed at disrupting mainland security.
Read more at SCMP.
The attacks are not all unidirectional. A report released in January by Taiwan’s National Security Bureau claimed that cyberattacks on Taiwan government departments had doubled in 2024 from the previous year to an average of 2.4 million attacks a day, with most of them allegedly launched by Chinese cyber forces.
Update: In response to China’s accusations, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB) told Reuters that the Chinese Communist Party is “manipulating inaccurate information to confuse the outside world.” The Taiwan News reports that the NSB
called the CCP a threat to global information security for spreading false information about cyber breaches.
The NSB added that the CCP has long carried out cyberattacks and theft of funds from Taiwan. It said this form of cognitive warfare attempts to destroy Taiwan’s critical infrastructure and grow social division.
