US charges Chinese national over spear-phishing attacks against agencies

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that former Aviation Industry Corporation of China employee Song Wu has been indicted with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft due to his alleged spear-phishing campaigns against the several U.S. government agencies, FedScoop reports.

Attacks purportedly conducted by Song and his co-conspirators between 2017 and 2021 involved the targeting of individuals part of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA, as well as aerospace firms and research university professors with spear-phishing emails that aimed to compromise aerospace engineering- and computational fluid dynamics-related software and source code, according to the Justice Department.

Such charges have been announced alongside indictments against a pair of Russians and a Massachusetts man who have been involved in alleged equipment smuggling to Russia as part of the Justice and Commerce Departments’ Disruptive Technology Strike Force. “As today’s announcements make clear, our efforts to protect sensitive U.S. technologies — which to date have yielded 24 publicly charged criminal cases, millions of dollars in administrative penalties, and multiple Entity List additions — remain relentless and unyielding,” said Commerce Department Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement Matthew Axelrod.