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How China’s Patriotic ‘Honkers’ Became the Nation’s Elite Cyberspies
A new report traces the history of the early wave of Chinese hackers who became the backbone of the state's espionage apparatus.
The PLA invited them to an intense, month-long hacker training camp, and within weeks Tan and his friends were building hacking tools, studying network infiltration techniques, and conducting simulated attacks. They created the GinWui rootkit, one of China’s first homegrown remote-access backdoors and then, experts believe, used it and dozens of zero-day exploits they wrote in a series of “unprecedented” hacks against US companies and government entities over the spring and summer of 2006. At some point, Tan switched teams and began contracting for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s civilian intelligence agency, as part of its notorious hacking group known as APT 41.
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