The American and British governments announced on Monday March 25 that they had taken sanctions against the alleged perpetrators of hacking linked to the Chinese government. The sanctions target in particular those allegedly responsible for a theft of personal data affecting the British electoral commission, discovered in 2022.
At the time the Electoral Commission explained that the stolen data contained the names and addresses of millions of British voters, but that most of this information was already public. The UK Foreign Office assured that the flight had “no impact” on elections or voter registration.
London also accuses Beijing of having carried out “reconnaissance operations”, prior to possible hacking, of the email boxes of four MPs critical of China. These “spottings” took place in 2021 and had been detected – the email boxes were not hacked, assures the government.
Joint denunciation with the United States
For its part, the US Treasury Department announced that it had placed the company Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company Ltd. under its sanctions regime, which it accuses of being a fake nose for the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Washington suspects two employees of the company, Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin, of being directly responsible for hacking attempts which targeted American companies in sensitive sectors, without specifying which ones. China’s Foreign Ministry responded to the new sanctions by saying they were “slander” and “false information.”
At the end of February, an unprecedented data leak, coming from a Chinese cybersecurity company working for several Chinese state services, lifted a corner of the veil on certain espionage operations delegated in China to the private sector. The documents showed in particular that the company called I-Soon had hacked the email accounts of elected officials or teachers, including in France.
