China’s cyber sector amplifies Beijing’s hacking of U.S. targets

The Washington Post ^ | July 16, 2025 8:00 AM EDT | Joseph Menn

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Undeterred by recent indictments alleging widespread cyberespionage against American agencies, journalists and infrastructure targets, Chinese hackers are hitting a wider range of targets and battling harder to stay inside once detected, seven current and former U.S. officials said in interviews.

Hacks from suspected Chinese government actors detected by security firm CrowdStrike more than doubled from 2023 to more than 330 last year and continued to climb as the new administration took over, the company said. Bursts of espionage are typical with each new president, the officials said, and major staff cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have disrupted some response coordination.

“The U.S. is absolutely facing the most serious Chinese hacking ever. We are in China’s golden age of hacking,” said China expert Dakota Cary of security company SentinelOne.

Although the various Chinese hacking campaigns seem to be led by different government agencies and have different goals, all benefit from new techniques and from Beijing’s introduction of a less constrained system for cyber offense, the officials and outside researchers told The Washington Post.

Chinese intelligence, military and security agencies previously selected targets and tasked their own employees with breaking in, they said. But the Chinese government decided to take a more aggressive approach by allowing private industry to conduct cyberattacks and hacking campaigns on their own, U.S. officials said.

The companies are recruiting top hackers who discover previously unknown, or “zero-day,” flaws in software widely used in the United States. Then the companies search for where the vulnerable programs are installed, hack a great many of them at once, and then sell access to multiple Chinese government customers and other security companies.

That hacking-for-hire approach creates hundreds of U.S. victims instead of a few, making it hard to block attacks and to decide which...

[sauropod]

Bkmk