cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35887823
The Czech Republic has issued a rare and sharply worded rebuke of the People’s Republic of China, formally attributing a long-running cyber-espionage campaign targeting its Ministry of Foreign Affairs to APT31 — a notorious hacking group directly associated with China’s secret police, which has systematically targeted U.S. politicians, election candidates and campaign staff, journalists, corporations, and critics of the Chinese Communist Party, alongside similar assaults on Canada and democracies worldwide.
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“These activities undermine the credibility of the People’s Republic of China and contradict its public declarations,” the Czech government stated. “They are contrary to the norms of responsible state behavior in cyberspace as endorsed by all UN Members.”
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The BIS, Czechia’s domestic intelligence service, also addressed the issue in its 2024 annual report. The agency warned that cyber operations are only one facet of the threat posed by Chinese state actors, writing: “The Chinese embassy logically focuses on gaining information about the Czech political scene.”
The campaign drew swift and strong expressions of solidarity from the European Union, NATO allies—and from Taiwan, which many officials and experts now view as the front line of China's cyber and cognitive war playbook.
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“These allegations pull back the curtain on China’s vast illegal hacking operation that targeted sensitive data from U.S. elected and government officials, journalists, and academics; valuable information from American companies; and political dissidents in America and abroad. Their sinister scheme victimized thousands of people and entities across the world, and lasted for well over a decade,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York.
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Canadian intelligence reported by The Bureau alleges that regional MSS bureaus across China competed for impact in Canada’s 2019 federal election, suggesting the brute force that decentralized MSS teams seek to impact upon foreign nations to achieve high-level objectives for MSS bosses in Beijing. In Canada’s case, The Bureau reported, MSS teams sought to win the release of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, rather than having her extradited to American justice, which would pose a catastrophic risk to Beijing’s security arms.
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At a 2024 conference in Ottawa attended by U.S. and Taiwanese officials, Shun-Ching Yang of Doublethink Lab and Eve Chiu of the Taiwan FactCheck Center warned that Taiwan has lived for decades under this form of “cognitive warfare”—a term used to describe China’s deliberate campaign to reshape perceptions, sow division, and disable democratic defenses through information dominance.
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To conceal attribution, the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP now routes many of its bot-driven propaganda operations through servers and agents in Cambodia—a proxy state for Chinese intelligence. Sophisticated, automated accounts flood WeChat, Twitter, and other platforms with disinformation dressed in local political commentary, targeting ethnic groups and migrant workers to provoke tension.
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“China has a very sick skill in reframing thinking of the society,” Yang said. “We have to be very careful about their sophisticated brainwashing of ideology, which we call cognitive warfare.”
“We have been facing this for decades, ever since I was a child,” Chiu added. “I think China’s government is trying to colonize Canada, because you are an ally of the United States. So they are trying to manipulate Canada against the U.S., because now is a very big competition between China and the U.S.”
The Czech Republic’s investigation shows how far this competition now extends—from the neural networks of fake social media posts to the physical servers of foreign ministries.