A Chinese company alleged CIA hackers have spent 11 years breaking into a range of Chinese industries, including government agencies.
The security company, Qihoo 360, said it discovered the spying campaign by comparing malicious software it discovered with a trove of CIA spy tools released by WikiLeaks in 2017.
Qihoo said the CIA targeted China’s energy and aviation sectors, scientific research organizations, internet companies, and government agencies.
“We speculate that in the past eleven years of infiltration attacks, CIA may have already grasped the most classified business information of China, even of many other countries in the world. It does not even rule out the possibility that now CIA is able to track down the real-time global flight status, passenger information, trade freight and other related information,” the company said in a blog post.
The allegations follow last month’s indictment of four Chinese military hackers over the breach of Equifax, a U.S. credit reporting agency.
It’s also the latest fallout from WikiLeaks’s disclosure of the CIA cyber weapons, which is known as the Vault 7 leak. Prosecutors have accused a disgruntled former CIA analyst, Joshua Schulte, of handing over the arsenal to WikiLeaks as retaliation for setbacks at work.
Schulte has denied the allegation, saying he was unfairly targeted for the embarrassing leak.
