Chinese foreign ministry on Navalny and cyberattacks

China on Tuesday said the issue of the near fatal nerve-agent attack on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his subsequent jailing was "entirely an internal matter for Russia" and that no external forces should interfere.

The comments, at a regular foreign ministry briefing, came after the administration of US President Joe Biden sanctioned seven mid-level and senior Russian officials on Tuesday, along with more than a dozen government entities.

The measures, emphasizing the use of the Russian nerve agent as a banned chemical weapon, marked the Biden administration's first sanctions against associates of President Vladimir Putin.

The administration coordinated the sanctions with the European Union, which added to its own sanctions on Tuesday over the attack on Navalny.

Speaking in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said he hoped that the countries concerned can resolve the issue through "consultation and dialogue" instead of "unilateral sanctions."

Separately, Wang urged Microsoft to avoid "unfounded speculation and accusations" when tracing cyberattacks, after the company on Tuesday accused China-based government hackers of exploiting a bug in Microsoft's email server software to target US organizations.

Microsoft said that a “highly skilled and sophisticated” state-sponsored group operating from China has been trying to steal information from a number of American targets, including universities, defense contractors, law firms and infectious-disease researchers.

Microsoft said it has released security upgrades to fix the vulnerabilities to its Exchange Server software, which is used for work email and calendar services, mostly for larger organizations that have their own in-person email servers. It doesn't affect personal email accounts or Microsoft's cloud-based services.

The company said the hacking group it calls Hafnium was able to trick Exchange servers into allowing it to gain access. The hackers then masqueraded as someone who should have access and created a way to control the server remotely so that they could steal data from an organization's network.

Microsoft said the group is based in China but operates from leased virtual private servers in the U.S., which helps it avoid detection.

Also, U.S.-based cyber security company Recorded Future said that at least one Indian port was still being targeted by Chinese state-sponsored hackers as of Tuesday.

The company alleged that the Chinese hackers have been targeting Indian ports and power plants since the middle of 2020, when the border conflict broke out, despite Indian officials' denial of any cyberattacks.

At the briefing, Wang dismissed the allegation as "irresponsible" and urged the U.S. to "stop making trouble out of nothing."