What we know about the cyberattack which targeted several French elected officials, attributed to the Chinese hacker group APT31
The affair resurfaces in the middle of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to France. Seven French parliamentarians and a MEP, the head of the Republican list François-Xavier Bellamy, announced in recent days that they had been targeted by a computer hacking campaign sponsored by China. This cyberattack, carried out in 2021, was orchestrated by a group of hackers directly under the orders of Beijing, according to American intelligence which revealed the affair in March. Here is what we know about this computer attack.
According to a statement from the US Department of Justice published on March 25, the facts date back to 2021. The elected officials targeted by the hack received emails allegedly from reputable media or journalists. These messages contained one or more booby-trapped images which, upon opening the email, sent the sender extensive information about the device the victim was using. This so-called “pixel attack” technique can then be used to refine other phishing campaigns to make them more effective, several French elected officials told franceinfo.
The US Department of Justice attributed this attack to suspected members of the APT31 group. According to American authorities, this group of hackers (also nicknamed “Zirconium” or “Violet Typhoon” by Microsoft) belongs to a Chinese cyberespionage program run by the Hubei State Security Department, located in the city of Wuhan, and which reports directly to the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
The press release from the American authorities specifies that this APT31 cyberattack targeted “all European members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China”, an international network of elected officials from different political sides created in 2020 to act in a coordinated manner on various subjects relating to China (Covid-19, the repression of the Uighurs, the demonstrations in Hong Kong, etc.). It was through this press release that former senator André Gattolin, co-founder of this network of elected officials, learned of the existence of this hacking campaign and began to investigate to find the names of the targeted elected officials.
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- Source of information and images “francetvinfo“
