A Chinese company is said to have infiltrated and hacked around 100 terabytes of Indian immigration data.
According to a Washington Post investigation, Chinese hacking groups have gained access to 95.2 terabytes of immigration data from the Indian government, demonstrating that Beijing hackers are still targeting India heavily.
According to a story released by The Washington Post on Thursday, hacker groups with ties to the Chinese government have exposed a vast number of documents. These groups are allegedly targeting foreign governments, companies, and infrastructure in order to launch extensive cyberattacks.
According to the research, these hackers are taking advantage of “vulnerabilities in software systems from companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Google.”
“The cache offers an unprecedented look inside the operations of one of the firms that Chinese government agencies hire for on-demand, mass data-collecting operations,” the article continued, “containing more than 570 files, images, and chat logs.”
Cybersecurity professionals found the leaked files to be trustworthy, and they were uploaded on GitHub last week. Details of contracts to harvest foreign data through cyberattacks were revealed in these papers. The contracts targeted 20 foreign countries, including those of Malaysia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, India, and more.
According to The Post, these records belonged to ISoon, a Chinese business with its headquarters located in Shanghai that is well-known for providing data collection and hacking services to Chinese government agencies and state-owned enterprises.
Researchers from cybersecurity company SentinelLabs said in a blog post on Wednesday that ISoon also compromised universities, the NATO military alliance, and “democracy organizations” in China’s semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong.
According to The Washington Post, one of the ISoon documents that was released included a list with 80 possible targets for a cyberattack, with India having already been successfully targeted.
Eighty foreign targets were included in a spreadsheet that suggested that iSoon hackers had effectively compromised them. The haul includes 3 terabytes of call logs from South Korea’s LG U Plus cellphone service and 95.2 gigabytes of immigration data from India, according to the article.
The official ISoon website remained unavailable after Thursday morning, however, the documents pertaining to the data breach revealed that the company had access to internal communications, including the email accounts of government personnel and staff from overseas companies.
China’s targeted hacking activities have alarmed US intelligence officials, who think China represents the greatest long-term threat to US security. Comparably, New Delhi has also using pressure to prevent access to Chinese mobile apps on the grounds that Beijing might be keeping an eye on them.
