UK claims China initiated cyberattack against Ukraine before start of war

The latest report suggests that just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China initiated cyber-attacks on Ukrainian military and nuclear targets. UK government stated that the National Cyber Security Centre was looking into the accusations by Ukraine, which claim that the Chinese government coordinated thousands of hacking attempts against a number of websites, including Ukraine's defence ministry. The memos titled "Chinese Attacks on Ukrainian Government, Medical, and Education Networks," obtained by the Times stated that over 600 websites belonging to Kyiv's defence ministry and other organisations were hacked thousands of times.

A source in Ukraine's security service, the SBU, stated that the effort was coordinated by the Chinese government, according to the Times. Chinese attacks began before the end of the Winter Olympics and peaked on February 23, the day before Russian troops and tanks crossed the border, indicating that China was complicit in the invasion. Jamie MacColl, a research person at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies stated that the claimed attempts looked to fit a Chinese technique of scanning for loopholes in IT infrastructure, such as firewalls and virtual private networks.

US intelligence data confirms the information

US intelligence data suggests that the information acquired by British and Ukrainian intelligence is reliable, according to the Jerusalem Post. Check Point Research (CPR), which is a cyber threat intelligence has claimed that global attacks from Chinese IPs are progressively increasing. CPR believes that since the start of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, hackers both inside and outside China have increasingly used Chinese IP addresses to commit cyberattacks.

Earlier, Ukraine said that Russian hackers had taken down 70 government websites, including one that contained personal vaccination data and certificates, back in January, more than a month before the invasion. Ukrainian officials rushed to repair the sites as soon as possible. Last year, Ukraine's security service claimed to have stopped more than 1,000 cyberattacks.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in Beijing during the Winter Olympics

In the meanwhile, US President Joe Biden warned his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on March 18 that helping Russia during the invasion would have consequences. At the outset of the Winter Olympics in February, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in Beijing and released a joint statement declaring that the two countries' connections have no limits. In the declaration, Xi and Putin both stated their opposition to any future NATO expansion.

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