Wu Haibo, Computer Intrusion, New York 2023

Twelve Chinese nationals, including two officers of the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), employees of an ostensibly private PRC company, Anxun Information Technology Co. Ltd. (安洵信息技术有限公司) also known as ‘i-Soon,’ and members of Advanced Persistent Threat 27 (APT27), were charged in a federal court in Manhattan with conducting computer intrusions at the direction of the PRC’s MPS and Ministry of State Security (MSS).

The victims include U.S.-based critics and dissidents of the PRC, a large religious organization in the United States, the foreign ministries of multiple governments in Asia, and U.S. federal and state government agencies, including the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) in late 2024.

The indictment charges Wu Haibo and seven other i-Soon employees, as well as two MPS officers, Yin Kecheng and Zhou Shuai, with their involvement in the hacking of email accounts, cell phones, servers, and websites from at least in or around 2016 through in or around 2023.

The PRC’s MPS and MSS employed an extensive network of private companies and contractors in China to hack and steal information in a manner that obscured the PRC government’s involvement. The MPS and MSS paid private hackers in China to exploit specific victims, and in many other cases, the hackers targeted victims speculatively.

The result of this largely indiscriminate approach was more worldwide computer intrusion victims, more systems worldwide left vulnerable to future exploitation by third parties, and more stolen information, often of no interest to the PRC government and, therefore, sold to other third-parties.

The indictment also charges the defendants with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets, and other related charges. The court-authorized seizure of the primary internet domain used by i-Soon was also announced.

The charges were announced by the Justice Department, FBI, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and Departments of State and the Treasury. The indictment is the result of a coordinated effort to disrupt and deter the malicious cyber activities of the PRC’s hacker-for-hire ecosystem.

The defendants are charged in U.S. v. Wu Haibo et al., Southern District of New York. The exact date of the indictment is not specified, but it is believed to be in or around 2023.

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