Security News > 2022 > September > China Accuses NSA's TAO Unit of Hacking its Military Research University

China has accused the U.S. National Security Agency of conducting a string of cyberattacks aimed at aeronautical and military research-oriented Northwestern Polytechnical University in the city of Xi'an in June 2022.

The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre disclosed its findings last week, and accused the Office of Tailored Access Operations at the USA's National Security Agency of orchestrating thousands of attacks against the entities located within the country.

"The U.S. NSA's TAO has carried out tens of thousands of malicious cyber attacks on China's domestic network targets, controlled tens of thousands of network devices, and stole more than 140GB of high-value data," the NCVERC said.

The agency further said that the attack on the Northwestern Polytechnical University employed no fewer than 40 different cyber weapons that are designed to siphon passwords, network equipment configuration, network management data, and operation and maintenance data.

The attacks are said to have been mounted via a network of proxy servers hosted in Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Poland, and Ukraine to relay the instructions to the compromised machines, with the agency noting that the NSA made use of an unnamed registrar company to anonymize the traceable information such as relevant domain names, certificates, and registrants.

This is not the first time China has called out the U.S. for its intelligence hacking operations.

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