What just happened? We're used to seeing government agencies accuse China of carrying out cyberattacks against the US, but the Asian nation isn't averse to throwing the same accusations at the United States. China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) says the NSA has carried out cyberattacks against its National Time Service Center (NTSC), adding that the breaches could have impacted network communications, financial systems, the power supply, and even the international standard time.
The MSS alleges that the NSA exploited vulnerabilities in the messaging services of an unnamed foreign mobile phone brand to steal data and login credentials from NTSC staff between 2022 and 2024. The agency allegedly used this to spy on the workers' mobile devices and the center's network systems.
The MSS' WeChat post highlights a number of elements that could be disrupted by an attack on the NTSC, which generates and distributes China's standard time. These include national communications, transportation, aerospace launches, finance, electric power, surveying and mapping, national defense, and more. The ministry said that it had provided guidance to the center to eliminate the risks.
The MSS claims that the NSA used 42 different "special cyber weapons" to target the NTSC's multiple internal network systems and attempted to infiltrate a key timing system in 2023 and 2024.
The MSS post also claims that the NSA attacks were carried out from late night to early morning Beijing time, and that the agency used the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and Europe, as well as VPNs, as springboards for the attacks.
The MSS finishes by accusing the US of having "repeatedly trampled on international cyberspace rules," and that its "ironclad facts" prove that the United States is the "real Matrix and the biggest source of chaos in cyberspace." What those facts are was not disclosed by the Chinese agency.
The US Embassy responded to the claims by saying that China's hackers are the most active and persistent threat to the US government and companies.
China and the US have a long history when it comes to hacking. In 2015, then-President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that they had come to an agreement that "neither country's government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property." But attacks on US companies by Chinese government-backed hackers were reported just a few weeks later.
One of the biggest hacks the US blamed on China in recent times was the one on Microsoft Exchange in 2021.
In February 2022, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray said that China is responsible for more cyberattacks on the US than every other country combined.
In 2023, China called the US an "Empire of Hacking," a claim that was mostly based on a 2017 series of leaks on the CIA by Wikileaks, codenamed Vault7.