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Security researchers have correlated the activity of a Chinese hacker group known for targeting aerospace companies to a multi-year espionage effort by China’s intelligence agencies to further the development of the country’s C919 aircraft, an airliner designed to compete with similar planes from Airbus and Boeing.
The Comac C919 is a narrow-body twinjet airliner whose development started in 2008 and had its first maiden flight in 2017 after various delays due to technological issues. While being touted as a Chinese-made aircraft, the plane uses many components supplied by aerospace companies from Europe and North America.
Between 2010 and 2015, coinciding with the plane’s development, researchers from CrowdStrike tracked a China-based group they dubbed Turbine Panda that launched cyberespionage attacks against several of the companies that supply C919 components. They now believe this was part of a coordinated effort by China to bridge the technology gap needed to produce the same components locally by state-owned enterprises.
Evidence indicates that effort was coordinated by the JSSD, the Jiangsu Bureau of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), and that it combined traditional espionage by recruiting insiders in targeted companies, as well as cyber intrusions by Turbine Panda.
“From August 2017 until October 2018, the DoJ [the U.S. Department of Justice] released several separate but related indictments against Sakula developer YU Pingan, JSSD Intelligence Officer XU Yanjun, GE Employee and insider ZHENG Xiaoqing, U.S. Army Reservist and assessor JI Chaoqun, and 10 JSSD-affiliated cyber...