FBI Disrupts Chinese Proxy Tools Used in Mass Hacking of US Agencies and Infrastructure

China's hacking campaign targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the US Senate, the Justice Department, and more, according to the DOJ. For years, China's military and intelligence agencies, which carry out hacking campaigns against targets around the globe, have grown increasingly reliant on a vast web of proxy devices that enable and obfuscate their targeting. Now the FBI has named and disrupted one key network of those proxies--and in doing so, revealed just how extensively the hackers who used it reached into American government institutions and US critical infrastructure. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced the takedown of two tools, known as QTRouter and QScan, used by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group the DOJ identified as QTFY, which is allegedly part of a Chinese government contractor called Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company. According to prosecutors and an FBI affidavit used to seize domains that those tools relied on, the company gave its customers access to botnets of hacked internet-of-things (IoT) devices and co-opted commercial proxy services.