US charges two Chinese nationals over a 10+ year hacking spree, alleging theft of terabytes of data, including vaccine secrets, from many orgs in 11 countries
U.S. prosecutors have charged two Chinese nationals, said to be working for China's state intelligence bureau …
TechCrunchZack Whittaker
Context & Ripple Effects
This indictment extends a DOJ playbook running since at least late 2018, when prosecutors charged members of China's APT10 unit over data theft from dozens of US tech firms and government agencies, and separately charged ten Chinese nationals for hacking US and European companies between 2010 and 2015. It lands one day after the same coronavirus vaccine hacking charges were announced, with this filing adding the longer arc — more than a decade, terabytes of data, victims in eleven countries.
What makes this filing notable within that sequence is its explicit framing of the suspects as working for China's state intelligence bureau, tightening the link between individual indictments and the state apparatus they serve — a linkage that resurfaces years later when the DOJ charges twelve Chinese nationals, including PRC staff, over an espionage campaign hitting US federal agencies.
First-order effects
The DOJ has put names and an MSS affiliation on two specific operators, converting diffuse suspicion of state-backed hacking into attributable individuals — though with both suspects likely beyond US arrest reach, the practical effect is diplomatic pressure rather than prosecution.
Organizations across the eleven named countries now face confirmation their networks were compromised over years, triggering breach disclosures, forensic remediation, and hard questions from regulators and boards about detection gaps.
Second-order effects
Victim-country governments get a ready-made basis for coordinated responses — joint attributions, sanctions, or expulsions — because a single US indictment naming eleven countries' victims does the coalition-building work for them.
For companies racing on vaccines and other sensitive R&D, the charges raise the price of thin network segmentation and third-party access controls, pushing security spending toward the kinds of targets the indictment shows adversaries prioritize.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — indictments in 2018, 2020, and again in 2025 targeting state-linked Chinese hackers without arrests — indictment-by-press-release cements itself as the West's main public countermeasure, a naming-and-shaming instrument substituting for deterrence that actually changes operator behavior.
The steady drumbeat of state-attributed theft charges accelerates the decoupling logic already visible in US–China tech policy: sensitive research and IP treated as contested territory, with governments assuming espionage is a persistent operating condition rather than an anomaly.
The trend: US indictments of state-linked Chinese hackers have become a recurring geopolitical instrument, with each new case hardening the assumption that state-sponsored IP theft is a permanent feature of US–China tech rivalry.
China [is] in that shameful club of nations that provide a safe haven for cyber criminals in exchange for those criminals being ‘on call’ to work for the benefit of the state," @TheJusticeDept. US accuses hackers of trying to steal #COVID19 data for #China https://www.justice.gov…
Unfortunately, this isn't the first time the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to steal our intellectual property. Now, they are doing it again and taking further advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic they failed to contain. https://www.wsj.com/...
Based on the indictment, this is exactly the kind of case that @TheJusticeDept should focus on: allegations of serious, repeated hacking, including of PRC dissidents' accounts More on finding a path that uses criminal law in a thoughtful & measured way: https://www.chinafile.com/…
Obviously IP theft is a real problem on many fronts, but..... why is any COVID research proprietary? This should be all hands on deck and helping each other. https://twitter.com/...
Important summary and details related to what was alleged few weeks back “two accused hackers also probed the cyber defenses of at least four American companies working on coronavirus treatment and testing in recent months, the indictment alleged.” https://www.wsj.com/...
“... prosecutors accused the hackers of targeting the networks of over a dozen U.S. companies in Maryland, Massachusetts and California developing vaccines and treatments for COVID-19.” https://techcrunch.com/...
Curiously, a week ago when Russia did the same thing and hacked US researchers, Lumpy said nothing. I wonder whyski this is? https://techcrunch.com/...
Chinese hackers broke into the computer networks of an unnamed British artificial intelligence and cancer research business in April, the US government has claimed in a new indictment https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ ...
Webshells, lateral movement, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trade secrets & yet, months without detection. This is literally why we built @ThinkstCanary. You can be up & running in minutes. Drop us a note to see why some of the smartest sec ppl in the world run Canary h…
Over the past decade, the two hackers are accused of stealing a ton of highly-sensitive data — trade secrets, defense tech, etc. — but only more recently COVID-19 research. Dozens of victims — most in the U.S. but also in Europe & Australia. More: https://techcrunch.com/... https…
New: US prosecutors have charged two Chinese spies for an alleged decade-long hacking campaign that resulted in the theft of terabytes of sensitive data — including COVID-19 vaccine research — and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of trade secrets. https://techcrunch.com/.…