Chinese Firms Hacking Data, Including Indian, for Government Espionage

Several Chinese firms are implicated in hacking data from various countries, including India, and supplying it to the Chinese government. Documents leaked online by I-Soon, also known as Auxun in China, revealed the theft of at least 95.2 gigabytes of immigration data from India, as reported by the New York Times (NYT).

“I-Soon is called Auxun in China. It is headquartered in Shanghai and sells third-party hacking and data-gathering services to Chinese government bureaus, security groups, and state-owned enterprises,” added the Washington Post (WaPo) report.

Last week, over 570 files, images, and chat logs were posted to GitHub, sourced from I-Soon. These files contained data not only from India but also from at least 80 overseas targets, including telecommunications firms in Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, and Taiwan.

“I-Soon clients also requested or obtained infrastructure data…the firm had a sample of 459 GB of road-mapping data from Taiwan, the island of 23 million that China claims as its territory,” the report further stated.

While most of the data originated from Asia, there were also records from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). According to NYT, I-Soon claimed access to internal email services or intranet access for multiple Southeast Asian government ministries, including Malaysia’s foreign and defense ministries and Thailand’s national intelligence agency.

The leaked data contained personal information from accounts on platforms like Telegram and Facebook. Reports indicate that I-Soon is just one of “hundreds of private companies” aiding the Chinese government in espionage activities.

“It is unclear how much the data is sold for, but reports suggest that I-Soon gave the Chinese government access to the private website of traffic police in Vietnam for $15,000. For personal data from social media sites, it was billed $278,000,” the reports concluded.