The Netherlands’s two major intelligence services announced this week that China conducted a 2023 cyber intrusion into that nation’s Defense Ministry. The intrusion centered on exploiting a security flaw in the Fortinet company’s FortiGate security system and then introducing a persistent backdoor channel into a Dutch military unit that was using FortiGate. Fortunately, the military unit in question was limited in size and working on unclassified operations.

Still, the AIVD civilian intelligence service and its MIVD military intelligence service declared that “MIVD & AIVD assess with high confidence that the intrusion at the [Defense Ministry], as well as the development of the malware described in this report, was conducted by a state-sponsored actor from the People’s Republic of China. MIVD & AIVD emphasize that this incident does not stand on its own, but is part of a wider trend of Chinese political espionage against the Netherlands and its allies.”