BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. Justice Department and FBI have seized two internet platforms operated and used by China state-sponsored hackers that targeted U.S. critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks.
As described in court documents unsealed in the Southern District of California, a Chinese state-sponsored group known as 'QTFY,' employed by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company, created and operated two complementary hacking platforms known as QScan and QTRouter.
Among the victims of QTFY computer intrusion are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Reserve, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Senate.
According to court documents, QTFY offers computer hacking services to its paying customers, including the Chinese Ministry of State Security and the People's Liberation Army. QScan scans and automatically infects thousands of 'internet-of-things' (IoT) devices worldwide, which are then added to the QTRouter network of QTFY-controlled devices.
QTRouter consists of these compromised IoT devices, as well as commercial proxy service devices and leased virtual private servers. QTRouter then serves as an 'obfuscation network', meaning it allows QTFY and other malicious cyber actors to conceal the Chinese origin of their computer intrusion activities because the malicious communications appear to originate from computers that are outside China and may even be local to the targeted networks. Because the seized domains were hard-coded into both the QScan and QTRouter malware and used for essential tasks such as communication and authentication, the court-authorized seizures made QScan and QTRouter inoperable.
This is the latest in a series of court-authorized technical operations against indiscriminate hacking activities by China.
The FBI's San Diego Field Office and Cyber Division, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California, and the National Security Cyber Section of the Justice Department's National Security Division investigated the hacking operation and led efforts to disrupt them.
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