The U.S. Justice Division has confirmed the arrest of Chinese language nationwide Xu Zewei, an alleged prolific contract hacker who carried out cyberattacks for China. Xu was arrested in Italy on the request of U.S. prosecutors.
Xu and one other Chinese language nationwide Zhang Yu, who stays at massive, are accused in a nine-charge indictment of “hacking and stealing essential COVID-19 analysis” from U.S. universities throughout February 2020. The DOJ stated Xu labored for a corporation known as Shanghai Powerock Community, which performed hacking operations for the Chinese language authorities.
The alleged hackers are additionally accused of the mass hacks of Microsoft Trade servers starting in March 2021. The hackers, publicly known as a bunch known as Hafnium, broke into greater than 60,000 self-hosted Trade servers run by largely small companies throughout america, permitting the theft of personal firm mailboxes and handle books.
Hafnium has since launched a brand new hacking marketing campaign, dubbed Silk Hurricane, which researchers say is thought for hacking into large corporations and authorities companies.