Hacks that were conducted via sloppily worded spearphishing emails by units of the People's Liberation Army are now carried out by an elite satellite network of contractors at front companies and universities
Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, addresses a news conference at the White house in Washington on Feb. 17, 2021, about the SolarWinds cyber attack. The Biden administration on Monday, July 19, 2021, formally accused the Chinese government of breaching Microsoft email systems used by many of the world’s largest companies, governments and military contractors, as the United States joined a broad group of allies, including all NATO members, to condemn Beijing for cyberattacks around the world. (Pete Marovich/The New York Times)
Nearly a decade ago, the United States began naming and shaming China for an onslaught of online espionage, the bulk of it conducted using low-level phishing emails against American companies for intellectual property theft.
On Monday, the United States again accused China of cyberattacks. But these attacks were highly aggressive, and they reveal that China has transformed into a far more sophisticated and mature digital adversary than the one that flummoxed U.S. officials a decade ago.
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