Advertisement
Cybersecurity
AsiaEast Asia

EU’s first cyber sanctions hit groups including Chinese spies, North Korean firm

  • Two Chinese nationals were accused of involvement in ‘Operation Cloud Hopper’, which spied on cloud services providers in six continents
  • North Korean firm Chosun Expo backed cyberattacks including WannaCry, and cyber robberies of Vietnamese and Bangladeshi banks

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
The sanctions include a travel ban and asset freezes, the EU says. Photo: Shutterstock
Associated Press
The European Union (EU) on Thursday imposed its first-ever sanctions over cyberattacks, slapping them on alleged Russian military agents, organisations including a North Korean firm, and Chinese cyber spies.
Advertisement

The six people and three groups hit with sanctions include Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. EU headquarters blamed them in a statement for the 2017 “WannaCry” ransomware and “NotPetya” malware attacks and the “Cloud Hopper” cyber-espionage campaign.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the sanctions “are a travel ban and asset freeze to natural persons and an asset freeze to entities or bodies. It is also prohibited to directly or indirectly make funds available to listed individuals and entities or bodies”.

Four Russians identified as GRU members were accused of trying to hack the Wi-fi network of the Netherlands-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, which has probed the use of chemical weapons in Syria. The 2018 attack was foiled by Dutch authorities.
The GRU was also sanctioned for NotPetya, which targeted companies that do business with Ukraine and caused billions of dollars in damage globally, and cyberattacks on Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 and 2016.
The two sanctioned Chinese nationals were accused of involvement in “Operation Cloud Hopper”, which the EU said hit companies on six continents, including Europe, through cloud services providers and “gained unauthorised access to commercially sensitive data, resulting in significant economic loss”.

One of the two, Zhang Shilong, was indicted in the United States in December 2018 for his alleged role in the operation, which US authorities said at the time targeted a wide array of industries including aviation, biotechnology and satellite and maritime technology.
Advertisement