Two members of the Chinese military have been implicated in the theft of plans for the Lockheed Martin F-35 joint strike fighter and other aircraft, court documents revealed this week.
The documents, obtained from a Vancouver court by Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, show that two unnamed co-conspirators worked with Su Bin, a 50-year-old Chinese aviation industry entrepreneur living in Canada, to steal the plans in 2013.
According to the documents, Su directed the hackers to the American aviation engineers he believed would hold the most value. They then targeted their email accounts, and after breaking in, used the accounts as leverage to access corporate networks for information on designs for the F-35 and F-22 Raptor, both by Lockheed, and the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III designs. Throughout the process, they conferred with Su as to what information they should seize. Besides Boeing and Lockheed, Airbus was also targeted.
Plans for the B-2 stealth bomber and the Space Based Laser were stolen the same year, in addition to information from the systems that operate nuclear submarines and anti-aircraft missiles.
One of the co-conspirators was identified through an intercepted messages that contained “Chinese military identification showing his photograph, name, rank, military unit, and year and month of birth.”
The Globe report asked why the U.S. didn’t reveal the connection earlier. “It is not clear why U.S. prosecutors minimized the military connection at first, nor why they declined to lay charges against the two co-conspirators if their identities are known,” the report noted. The court documents also omit any formal reference to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
Thom Mrozek, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment “at this time,” citing a pending extradition proceeding against Su. In September, a Vancouver judge ordered that Su be released to the U.S. for trial, but the order has been stayed pending an appeal for later this year.
China has denied responsibility for cyberattacks against the U.S. over the past year. The Obama administration has accepted the denials and sought to play down any negative effect the attacks have had.
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An assessment published by the National Security Agency toward the end of 2014 quantified the scope of defense industrial espionage the Chinese had conducted. The agency reported that 600,000 user accounts over 1,600 networks had been compromised, with data stolen equivalent to five Libraries of Congress.
