U.S. and Britain accuse China-linked hackers of ‘malicious’ cyber campaigns, announce sanctions

Published

1 year ago

March 25, 2024

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LONDON — The U.S. and U.K. on Monday accused hackers linked to the Chinese state of being behind “malicious” cyber campaigns targeting political figures, in moves expected to stoke tensions with Beijing.

The British government also alleged that China-affiliated hackers were behind an attack that saw the data of millions of voters accessed.

“I can confirm today that Chinese state-affiliated actors were responsible for two malicious cyber campaigns targeting our democratic institutions and parliamentarians,” British Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said in a speech to Parliament on Monday.

Dowden attributed a hack on the Electoral Commission, the independent agency tasked with setting standards for how U.K. elections should be run, to a China state-affiliated actor. The campaigns were said to have taken place between 2021 and 2022.

The attack was identified by the Electoral Commission in October 2022, but wasn’t disclosed until last year. Hackers accessed the names and addresses of anyone in Britain registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, the Electoral Commission said in a 2023 public notice.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the U.K. said allegations of China being behind cyberattacks in the U.K. were “completely fabricated and malicious slanders.”

“We strongly oppose such accusations,” the Chinese Embassy spokesperson told reporters at a press briefing Monday, according to an update that was posted on its website. “China has always firmly fought all forms of cyber attacks according to law.”

‘A clear pattern’

Dowden said the U.K. believes China to be behind attempted reconnaissance on the email accounts of U.K. lawmakers in the summer of 2021. He accused the Chinese hacking group APT31 of being behind this attack.

Cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which is owned by Google, describes APT31 as a “China-nexus cyber espionage actor focused on obtaining information that can provide the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises with political, economic, and military advantages.”

Dowden added that attempts to compromise the email accounts of U.K. lawmakers were however “unsuccessful.”

“We want now to be as open as possible with the House and the British public,” Dowden said. “This is the latest in a clear pattern of hostile activity originating in China.”

Dowden said the U.K. had sanctioned two individuals residing within China, as well as an entity affiliated with APT31.

U.S. hits out at China

Separately, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment Monday accusing Chinese state-linked hackers of being behind cyber campaigns targeting U.S. businesses, government officials and politicians.

The DOJ charged seven Chinese nationals, Ni Gaobin; Weng Ming; Cheng Feng; Peng Yaowen; Sun Xiaohui; Xiong Wang; and Zhao Guangzong, with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for involvement in a China-based hacking group that spent 14 years targeting U.S. and foreign critics, businesses and political officials.

These individuals operated as part of the APT31 hacking group, the DOJ said.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate efforts by the Chinese government to intimidate Americans who serve the public, silence the dissidents who are protected by American laws, or steal from American businesses,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement Monday.

“This case serves as a reminder of the ends to which the Chinese government is willing to go to target and intimidate its critics, including launching malicious cyber operations aimed at threatening the national security of the United States and our allies,” Garland added.

Geopolitical tensions

The announcements from the U.K. and U.S. are likely to draw the ire of Beijing.

Relations between the U.K. and China have soured over the years, particularly on the tech front, following actions from the British government designed to stem national security risks from Chinese technology companies.

“The impact of such a breach on UK-Sino relations could be profound,” Javvad Malik, lead security awareness advocate at cybersecurity firm KnowBe4, told CNBC on Monday via email.

“It’s likely to escalate tensions, leading to diplomatic strain and potentially resulting in retaliatory actions in the cyber domain or other areas of bilateral cooperation.”

Malik added that the situation “necessitates a robust response not only in terms of securing compromised systems and preventing further breaches but also in reinforcing the international legal and norms-based systems governing state behavior in cyberspace.”

“To mitigate the aftermath and prevent future incidents, it’s crucial for nations to invest in stronger cybersecurity defenses, international collaboration, and developing capabilities to deter adversaries in the cyberspace domain,” he said.

Some hawkish lawmakers have been pressuring the U.K. government to take tougher action on China.

The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a cross-border group of lawmakers seeking to reform policy on China, said Monday in a post on social media platform X that they, along with other members of Parliament, activists and dissidents, have been “subjected to harassment, impersonation, and attempted hacking from China for some time.”

“We take this opportunity to highlight that, though extremely unwelcome, our discomfort pales in comparison to Chinese dissidents who risk their lives to oppose the Chinese Communist Party. It is high time that they received greater support for their host governments,” the group said.

In 2020, for example, the U.K. government banned telecommunications equipment from Huawei in its 5G mobile network, citing spying concerns. Huawei, for its part, denies the allegations and says it wouldn’t cooperate with China to spy on Western communications.

Relations between the U.S. and China have also been under significant pressure. U.S. lawmakers recently approved a controversial bill that could lead to TikTok being blocked in the U.S. if it doesn’t break with its Chinese parent ByteDance.

If the bill becomes law, TikTok would have a little less than six months to divest from ByteDance, or be banned from apps and webhosting sites in the U.S.

Technology

OpenAI wins $200 million U.S. defense contract

Published

3 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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OpenAI wins 0 million U.S. defense contract

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.

The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”

“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.

Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.

The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.

In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

Published

6 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Published

7 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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