Security News > 2023 > May > Escalating China-Taiwan Tensions Fuel Alarming Surge in Cyber Attacks

The rising geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan in recent months have sparked a noticeable uptick in cyber attacks on the East Asian island country.

"From malicious emails and URLs to malware, the strain between China's claim of Taiwan as part of its territory and Taiwan's maintained independence has evolved into a worrying surge in attacks," the Trellix Advanced Research Center said in a new report.

The attacks, which have targeted a variety of sectors in the region, are mainly designed to deliver malware and steal sensitive information, the cybersecurity firm said, adding it detected a four-fold jump in the volume of malicious emails between April 7 and April 10, 2023.

What's more, the spike in malicious emails targeting Taiwan has been followed by a 15x increase in PlugX detections between April 10 and April 12, 2023, indicating that the phishing lures acted as an initial access vector to drop additional payloads.

"In the past few years, we noticed that geopolitical conflicts are one of the main drivers for cyber attacks on a variety of industries and institutions," Joseph Tal, senior vice president of the Trellix Advanced Research Center, said.

"Monitoring geopolitical events can help organizations to predict cyber attacks in countries they operate in."

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