“In February 2020, as the world entered a pandemic, Xu Zewei and other cyber actors working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) targeted American universities to steal groundbreaking COVID-19 research. Police in Italy arrested a 33-year-old accused by U.S. officials of being a member of a Chinese state-backed group allegedly responsible for hacking into a Texas university to steal COVID-19 vaccine information. The DOJ claimed Zewei worked for Shanghai Powerock Network when he conducted the cyberattacks, lending further credence to their wider concern that China is using an array of private companies to launch state-backed intrusion campaigns in an effort to provide plausible deniability for the country’s government. The unsealed court documents accused Xu of being part of the team of state-backed hackers that targeted an unnamed Texas university in 2020 to obtain a vaccine for COVID-19. U.S. agencies and researchers have long accused China’s hacking operations of targeting research institutions working on COVID-19 vaccines as much of the world sought solutions to the devastating pandemic that began in 2020. The Justice Department said Xu was directed to “target and access specific email accounts belonging to virologists and immunologists engaged in COVID-19 research for the research university” on February 22, 2020. “Operating from their safe haven and motivated by profit, this network of private companies and contractors in China cast a wide net to identify vulnerable computers, exploit those computers, and then identify information that it could sell directly or indirectly to the PRC government,” the Justice Department said. Court documents said Xu and other hackers targeted U.S. universities, immunologists and virologists conducting research into COVID-19 vaccines, treatment and testing. The following year, these same actors, operating as a group publicly known as HAFNIUM, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in U.S. systems to steal additional research,” said Brett Leatherman, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division. In one breach of a law firm, Xu was ordered to search mailboxes for terms like “Chinese sources,” “MSS” and “HongKong” and other information regarding specific U.S. policy makers and government agencies. The Justice Department filed a warrant for his arrest in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in November 2023.
This Cyber News was published on therecord.media. Publication date: Tue, 08 Jul 2025 19:10:19 +0000