A joint venture made up of NATO member states, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan is forming together to confront the global threat posed by unlawful Chinese state-sponsored cyberattacks.
In its first action last Monday, the countries publicly blamed China’s Ministry of State Security for a massive cyberattack on Microsoft Exchange email servers earlier this year.
The attack was carried out by criminal contract hackers working for the MSS who are also rumored to engage in cyber-enabled extortion, cryptojacking, and ransomware.
The group plans to mutually discuss intelligence on cyberthreats and collaborate on network defenses and security.
Also, Monday, the FBI, National Security Agency, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a new advisory listing 50 tactics, techniques, and procedures that Chinese state-sponsored hackers are known to employ.
The Microsoft Exchange server attack became public in March and is believed to have hit a minimum of 30,000 American organizations and hundreds of thousands more worldwide.
Microsoft quickly identified the group behind the hack as a relatively unknown Chinese espionage network dubbed 'Hafnium'.
Until now, the United States has stopped short of publicly blaming Beijing for the attack.
The delay in naming China was partly to give investigators time to assemble the evidence to prove that the Hafnium hackers were on the Chinese state payroll.
It was also important for the United States to act in its allies' best interests when it made the public attribution.