Chinese hackers continue to attack American companies, despite President Xi Jinping’s agreement to crack down on cybercrime. Last month, Xi met with the Obama Administration and struck an accord to hinder hackers based in China from attempting to gain access to American companies’ trade secrets and databases.
CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, tracked recent attacks targeted at American pharmaceutical and tech companies back to IP addresses based in China. Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, asserts that the attacks occurred three weeks after the President’s visit but fortunately “no exfiltration of customer data actually took place.”
The Obama Administration is monitoring the situation carefully and has not ruled out imposing sanctions against China if attacks continue to occur without any repercussions. Alperovitch believes “sometime delay between agreement and execution is not entirely unexpected,” but “we need to know the parameters for success, and whether the parties to the agreement discussed a timeframe for implementation, or, instead, expected it to be immediate.”