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Sources from the Reuters news agency claim that hackers working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security have cracked the networks of HPE and IBM. Subsequently, the hackers would have misused this access to hack into the networks of customers of the tech companies.

Reuters reports this on the basis of five anonymous sources. According to them, the attacks are part of a Chinese campaign called Cloudhopper. According to the Americans and the British, it was used to infect service providers in the technology sector and to steal the secrets of their customers.

Cloudhopper Campaign

Since 2017, governments have been warning of the threat posed by Cloudhopper. A number of companies are said to have been hacked already. Which was not reported by the authorities. But now, on the basis of some anonymous sources, Reuters claims that the IBM and HPE networks have been hacked. Sources state that these companies are not the only major victims of Cloudhopper.

The Chinese hackers would have been active within the networks for some weeks and at a company even for some months. According to the sources, the attacks lasted a long time and therefore it was difficult to be sure of the security of the networks. According to sources, IBM investigated the case last summer and HPE in early 2017.

HPE and IBM comments

In a statement, IBM states that it is aware of the Cloudhopper campaign and that it has taken extensive countermeasures worldwide to protect the company and our customers from constantly changing threats. The company takes responsibility for data it holds for customers very seriously and has no evidence that sensitive IBM or customer data has been compromised by this threat.

HPE also states in a separate statement that the security of its customers’ data has the highest priority. We cannot respond to the specific details in the allegation, but HPE has transferred responsibility for its managed services to DXC Technology. The latter company did not want to respond, because it does not respond to messages about specific hack campaigns or groups by default.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.