Chinese Hackers About to be Named

The Justice Department is apparently not involved in the trade negotiations with China and has arrested the CFO of Huawei, a less than delicate move that seems to work to reverse progress.  This is not really related to trade per se, but there is going to be more if we can believe the Wall Street Journal yesterday.  This is part of a series of very serious break-ins by APT 10, FireEye says.  "They have historically targeted construction and engineering, aerospace, and telecom firms, and governments in the United States, Europe, and Japan. We believe that the targeting of these industries has been in support of Chinese national security goals, including acquiring valuable military and intelligence information as well as the theft of confidential business data to support Chinese corporations. PwC and BAE recently issued a joint blog detailing extensive APT10 activity."

The WSJ article says there is no relationship between Huawei and this case, but they are missing the whole concept of Chinese intelligence collection to say that.  There is no direct relationship.  The Chinese are using infrastructure equipment to collect and route that traffic back to China.  They won't have to hack directly to do that.  They can pull that traffic in and analyze it afterwords without the subject knowing they have been hacked.  They have lower exposure to getting caught. 

Over the past several months there has been quite a bit of reporting on various aspects of Chinese activities.  That finally has led to bringing actual charges against named individuals.  We shall see if the two cases are really not related when the evidence starts to be presented.  That is why you usually don't prosecute cases like this in court.  It exposes too much of the sources and methods involved in exposing the people being prosecuted.  It makes no sense.  It benefits the Chinese more than the US.