China’s hacking industry is vast but also suffers from shady business practices.
FILE - The interior of the I-Soon office, also known as Anxun in Mandarin, is seen after office hours in Chengdu in southwestern China's Sichuan Province on Feb. 20, 2024. The hotel was spacious. It was upscale. It had a karaoke bar. The perfect venue, the CEO of the Chinese hacking company thought, to hold a Lunar New Year banquet currying favor with government officials. There was just one drawback, his top deputy said.
Mei Danowski, a cybersecurity analyst who wrote about I-Soon on her blog, Natto Thoughts, said the documents show that China's hackers for hire work much like any other industry in China. Wu and some other hackers distinguished themselves by declaring themselves “red hackers” — patriots who offered their services to the Chinese Communist Party, in contrast to the freewheeling, anarchist and anti-establishment ethos popular among many coders.
For a couple of years, the intrusions subsided. But I-Soon and other private hacking outfits soon grew more active than ever, providing Chinese state security forces cover and deniability. I-Soon is “part of an ecosystem of contractors that has links to the Chinese patriotic hacking scene,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst of Google’s Mandiant cybersecurity unit.
I-Soon executives paid “introduction fees” for lucrative projects, chat records show, including tens of thousands of RMB to a man who landed them a 285,000 RMB contract with police in Hebei province. To sweeten the deal, I-Soon’s chief operating officer, Chen Cheng, suggested arranging the man a drinking and karaoke session with women.It wasn't just officials they courted. Competitors, too, were targets of wooing over late night drinking sessions.
The source of the I-Soon documents is unclear, and executives and Chinese police are investigating. And though Beijing has repeatedly denied involvement in offensive hacking, the leak illustrates I-Soon and other hacking companies’ deep ties with the Chinese state. At times, I-Soon hacked on demand. One chat shows two parties discussing a potential “long-term client” interested in data from several government offices related to an unspecified “prime minister.”
“You can't be Lei Feng," Wu wrote in private messages, referring to a long-dead Communist worker held up in propaganda for generations as a paragon of selflessness. “If you don't make money, being famous is useless." Low salaries and pay disparities caused employees to complain, chat records show. Leaked employee lists show most I-Soon staff held a degree from a vocational training school, not an undergraduate degree, suggesting lower levels of education and training. Sales staff reported that clients were dissatisfied with the quality of I-Soon data, making it difficult to collect payments.
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