U.S. and World Powers Condemn China for Malicious Cyber Activities

The United States, along with world powers like the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), condemned China for its numerous cyberattacks, specifically the attack that compromised Microsoft Exchange servers earlier this year.

However, the U.S. did not impose sanctions on China, raising concerns that a lack of punishment will not discourage China from continuing malicious cyber activities.

Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator, explained, “The lack of any sanctions by the U.S. government against Chinese cyberthreat actors is a huge problem that transcends four administrations…We need to stop treating China as if they have a special immunity to being held accountable, and we need to act in parity, as we have with the other major malicious cyber actors, including Russia.”

When questioned about why the government had not imposed sanctions on China, a senior Biden administration official said, “[we are] not ruling out further action to hold [China] accountable. We’re also aware that no one action can change behavior, and neither can one country acting on its own. So we really focused initially on bringing other countries along with us.”

The Microsoft email server hack compromised over 140,000 servers worldwide and raised concerns that other hacker groups could take advantage of these vulnerabilities to execute other attacks. Microsoft released a “one-click” security patch that reduced the number of compromised servers from 140,000 to fewer than 10,000 in the span of a week.

In April of this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an l operation to remove hundreds of Chinese placed “webshells” that remained on American computers as a result of the Microsoft hack. Webshells are malware designed to install a back door into targeted systems.

The DOJ also released indictments for three Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) officers who were allegedly tied to several malicious cyber schemes in the U.S. and other countries that occurred between 2011-2018.