A Chinese national hacked into the computers of major US universities and research labs to steal COVID-19 data as part of a government-sponsored cyberattack during the pandemic, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
“While the world was reeling from a virus that originated in China, the Chinese government plotted to steal US research critical to vaccine development,” FBI Houston Special Agent in Charge Douglas Williams said in a statement released Tuesday.
Suspect Zewei Xu, 33, infiltrated American research facilities as an agent for China’s Ministry of State Security and the Shanghai State Security Bureau to pilfer the information on the virus and vaccines over nearly two years, prosecutors in the District Attorneys Office in the Southern District of Texas said in the release.
Xu, who was on the run since 2023, was recently nabbed by the FBI and international authorities in Milan, Italy, after getting off a plane from China and is facing extradition to the US, prosecutors said.
“[Xu’s] landmark arrest by FBI Houston agents in Italy proves that we will scour the ends of the Earth to hold criminal foreign adversaries accountable,” Williams said.
According to a newly unsealed indictment, Xu and accused 44-year-old cohort Yu Zhang, who remains on the run, were part of a Chinese-sponsored covert plot to steal US data on COVID-19 research between February 2020 and June 2021. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI |
Italian authorities arrested a Chinese national accused by the United States of working at the direction of Beijing to steal COVID-19 vaccine research from U.S. universities, immunologists and virologists during the early days of the pandemic.
Xu Zewei, 33, of China, was arrested Thursday in Malan. The nine-count indictment charging him and his co-conspirator, 44-year-old Chinese national Zhang Yu, was unsealed Tuesday by the Justice Department as it seeks Xu's extradition. Zhang remains at large.
The arrest and filing of charges are the latest U.S. law enforcement action targeting Chinese nationals accused of working at the behest of Beijing's foreign intelligence arm, the Ministry of State Security, in recent months.
According to the indictment, Xu and his coconspirators were involved in the China state-sponsored HAFNIUM hacking campaign -- also known as Silk Typhoon -- that targeted vulnerabilities in the widely used Microsoft Exchange Server program to gain access to victims' information from February 2020 to June 2021.
Federal prosecutors said they used the vulnerabilities in the Microsoft program to install code known as webshells on their victims' computers, gaining remote access to the devices.
The victims were not named in the charging document, but are identified as a university located in the Southern District of Texas and a university based in North Carolina involved in "research into COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and testing," as well as a second university based in the southern district of Texas and a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, including internationally. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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