A British daily explains how hackers employed by the Chinese government operate: routinely use “vast networks” of internet-connected home appliances and gadgets to launch attacks on “national infrastructure and democratic institutions.” “FT” refers to the assessment of the intelligence agencies of Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, as well as the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, within which the services of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand cooperate.
On Thursday, the UK National Cybersecurity Center reported that Chinese cyber intelligence uses tens of thousands of ordinary home devices connected to the Internetto create networks of bots capable of carrying out attacks and stealing information. This practice is not new, but China uses it “strategically and on a large scale” – said the British center.
Our home appliances are easy to break into. For one reason
Hacking into routers or refrigerators in private homes and companies is not a problem because very often their software is not updated.. Networked equipment allows not only to carry out sophisticated attacks, but also to effectively mask them, explained a representative of a European intelligence agency in an interview with “FT”.
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In March, the Five Eyes alliance warned that Russia is also trying to use private equipment for cyber attacks, but China is doing it on a much larger scale.
The three most important Chinese hacking units, known as Volt Typhoon, Flax Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, and linked to the army and the Ministry of State Security, routinely use bot network attacks in their operations, Western services have found.
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In the opinion of US intelligence, the main goal of such attacks is to damage civilian and military systems, for example to make it more difficult for the US to respond to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan or another form of attack on the island.
