Security News > 2023 > January > Ex-GE engineer gets two years in prison after stealing turbine tech for China

An ex-General Electric engineer has been sentenced to two years in prison after being convicted of stealing the US giant's turbine technology for China.

New York resident Xiaoqing Zheng, 59, who used to be employed at GE Power and specialized in turbine sealing technology, was convicted of conspiracy to commit economic espionage at the end of March after a jury trial in the Northern District of New York courthouse.

To this end, Zheng and his co-conspirators hatched a plan to benefit the Chinese government and its organizations by stealing GE tech, prosecutors said.

Beginning in 2016, Zheng and others in China founded a company called Nanjing Tianyi Avi Tech that develops turbine parts.

Beginning in late November 2017, GE discovered a "Large number" of encrypted files had been saved to Zheng's work computer using AxCrypt, a program that GE doesn't provide to its employees.

"Through the steganography technique, Zheng placed the aforementioned electronic files into the binary code of a separate electronic file on the computer - an otherwise innocuous-looking digital photograph of a sunset. Zheng then emailed the digital photograph file of the sunset, which secretly contained the hidden GE electronic files containing GE's proprietary data, from his GE-provided email address to his personal email address at Hotmail."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/01/04/ge_turbine_china_prison/