A huge Chinese espionage operation was prevented by the FBI –

According to the information provided by the US Federal Department of Justice on Tuesday, the FBI, working together with the Paris-based cyber security organization Sekoia, cleaned thousands of devices of the software of the hacker group Twill Typhoon. The program, called PlugX, was most often found on computers via a USB connector, where it “prepared the ground for the extraction of certain files”. The software was first detected in 2012 and has been used by several hacker groups linked to the Chinese government since 2014.

The French government greatly aided the process of cleaning up PlugX, in part because 3,000 infected devices were found in France alone. In the United States, that number was 4,200, but the spyware discovered has since been cleaned up using a system developed by Sekoia. This cleaner was able to remotely send commands to those devices and rid them of PlugX.

According to the FBI report, the hackers penetrated the machines of public and private companies. Their main targets were European shipping companies, European government organizations, Chinese dissident groups, and the Indonesian and Pacific regions. The United States blames the Chinese government, which has denied everything.

Unfortunately, this was not the first, and probably will not be the last, similar procedure against attacks from external regions. The United States is waging an ongoing war on the battlefield of data security, and TikTok may be a collateral casualty of this battle.