U.S. intelligence agency National Security Agency has infiltrated Chinese tech company Huawei's servers since 2009, said China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) on Wednesday.
The U.S. Office of Tailored Access Operation (TAO), an affiliate of the NSA, began invading the servers at Huawei headquarters in 2009 and conducted continuous monitoring, China's MSS revealed in an article published on social media platform WeChat.
The MSS unveiled the U.S.'s multiple approaches to surveil and steal data from other countries days after its spyware, SecondDate, was identified in cyberattacks against China's Northwestern Polytechnical University.
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As a cyber-espionage weapon, the spyware has run secretly on thousands of network devices in many countries around the world, China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center announced on September 14.
The TAO has carried out tens of thousands of malicious cyberattacks on China's network targets, controlled tens of thousands of network devices and stolen a large amount of high-value data, according to the MSS.
The cases of cyberattacks and secret theft conducted by the U.S. have shown the despicable tactics of the "Empire of Hacking" in maintaining "cyber hegemony," said the MSS.
The large-scale cyberattacks carried out by the U.S. intelligence agencies could not be achieved without the use of diverse cyberweapons, such as the Bvp4, Quantum, FoxAcid and Hive, disclosed by China since 2022.
With these weapons and equipment, the U.S. has carried out cyberattacks and espionage operations over 10 years' worth of time against 45 countries and regions around the world, including China and Russia, covering telecommunications, scientific research, economy, energy, military and other core areas.
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Under the guise of national security, the U.S. government took advantages of laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It forces technology companies to plant backdoors in their gadgets, software or applications to steal data from end users worldwide by embedding malicious code or attacking via loopholes.
In December 2020, the company X-Mode was found selling location data harvested from apps to parties linked to U.S. military contractors and intelligence agencies.
The other company, Anomaly Six, a secretive government contractor, was found monitoring the movements of billions of phones around the world by embedding covert software development kits, or SDKs, in regular apps. The company gathered all the data and sold it to the U.S. government.
While the U.S. is carrying out all kinds of cyberattacks breaching national security around the globe, it creates all kinds of security reports smearing China as a threat in cyberspace.
It is an open secret for all that the U.S. has taken advantage of its advanced cyber capabilities to conduct a wide range of eavesdropping on other countries, including its allies, according to the MSS.
China has discovered the presence of the United States in a slew of cyberattacks against China since the PRISM program was exposed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The U.S.'s recent Hunt Forward Operations has been eyeing its main targets, including Russia, Iran, China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), in the name of active defense, said the MSS.
"The U.S. (is putting) in every effort to play the victim in the name of 'safeguarding cybersecurity' to coerce other countries into 'Clean Network' project, which aims to purge Chinese tech companies."
"Their goal is to suppress opponents and maintain their hegemony," it added.
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