China has conducted more cyberattacks against the United States of America than all of the other major nations combined, the director of the FBI has claimed.
In a speech earlier this week, Christoper Wray stated that the FBI is currently investigating more than 2,000 incidents in which China sought to “steal our information and technology”.
According to Wray, China has stolen “staggering volumes” of information from US companies and their endpoints, causing deep, job-destroying damage in numerous industries. It has come to a point in which the FBI opens roughly two new investigations every day.
Hiring criminals
China is able to do that, Wray further added, with "a lot of funding and sophisticated tools.” What’s more, it often employs other cybercriminal groups, or as he calls them - cyber mercenaries.
Wray noted that the Chinese are also causing a lot of collateral damage along the way, mentioning the recent Microsoft Exchange hack which “compromised the networks of more than 10,000 American companies in a single campaign alone.”
Wray also accused the Chinese of not honoring their own agreements. "In 2015, the Chinese government publicly promised to stop handing hacked US technology to Chinese companies, but their cyber theft program kept going strong." Even the China-US no-hack agreement, which was made in 2015, hasn’t stopped them from distributing malware across the virtual States and wreaking havoc:
"And in the years since, they've hit ever more companies and workers. We've seen small companies developing important medicines ransacked. We've seen big managed service providers remotely managing IT services for thousands of other businesses hacked, so the Chinese government could hijack their trusted connections with their customers and hack those companies, too."
But the US was not without a response, as well, he said, mentioning the move against Huawei. Still, he doesn’t expect the fight against China to end any time soon.
- Here’s our rundown of the best firewalls right now
Via: The Register
