BEIJING: China on Thursday, accused the United States and its allies of waging a “disinformation campaign” after Washington, its Western partners and Microsoft said state-sponsored Chinese hackers had infiltrated critical US infrastructure networks.
A statement released by US, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and UK authorities said, “The United States and international cybersecurity authorities are issuing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to highlight a recently discovered cluster of activity of interest associated with a People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actor, also known as Volt Typhoon,”.
In a separate statement, Microsoft said Volt Typhoon had been active since mid-2021 and had targeted critical infrastructure in Guam, a crucial US military outpost in the Pacific Ocean. “Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that this Volt Typhoon campaign is pursuing the development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises,” the statement said.
Condemning this, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said, “This is an extremely unprofessional report with a missing chain of evidence, this is just scissors-and-paste work,” claiming the allegations were “a collective disinformation campaign of the Five Eyes coalition countries”.