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WASHINGTON – Intelligence officers in a small office in China's vast intelligence-gathering network for years stole secrets from aerospace companies in the United States and abroad, Justice Department officials said on Tuesday in the third indictment that China's elaborate efforts to steal corporate secrets through espionage and hacking.
Two Chinese intelligence officers and five hackers repeatedly broke into a corporate computer system to steal intellectual property and other information about the aerospace industry, according to the indictment, which had been under seal since June.
From January 2010 to May 2015, they are flying turbofan engines and other confidential business information from 13 companies, according to short documents. They included Capstone Turbine, a gas turbine manufacturer based in Los Angeles, and other unnamed companies in Los Angeles and San Diego as well as Massachusetts, Arizona, Oregon and Wisconsin and overseas in Britain, France and Australia.
At the time, a Chinese government-owned aerospace company was developing a comparable commercial aircraft engine, the government said.
The officers worked in the Jiangsu Province Office of the Ministry of State Security, China's primary domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering agency. That office was also involved in China's efforts to steal information from the American Aerospace Industry.
China has long pilfered American corporate, academic and military information to bolster its position in the global economy, and the three cases show the Justice Department's continued crackdown on China's efforts to steal corporate data for China's commercial gain, Adam L. Braverman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of California, said in a statement.
"The concerted effort to steal, rather than simply purchase, should be one of the most important things about talent, energy and shareholder money in the development of products," he said.
This month, Yanjun Xu, deputy division director trying to steal secrets from GE Aviation. Mr. Xu was arrested in Belgium in April, about a year after he began grooming a GE employee to obtain and deliver corporate secrets, prosecutors said. The case was the first time a Chinese intelligence official was extradited to the United States to be tried in federal court.
In September, the Ji Chaoqun Judgment Department, a United States Army reservist from China, on the subject of intelligence in the field of intelligence , was Mr. Xu, according to an American official briefed on the investigation.
The information Mr. Ji provided would have been used in the Chinese government's efforts as informants, the Justice Department said.
Zha Rong and Chai Meng, co-conspirators in the Jiangsu office of working with hackers to steal turbofan technology in American and European commercial airliners. They also have a background in the Jiangsu Province office of the unnamed Gu Gen and Tian Xi, who had been recruited to act as spies by the Chinese intelligence officers. They were so charged.
An unidentified American company and the French manufacturer oversaw the turbofan engine project, according to short papers.
The hackers – Zhang Zhang-Gui, Liu Chunliang, Gao Kun Hong, Zhuang Xiaowei and Ma Zhiqi – also infiltrated other companies that made turbofan jet engine parts, prosecutors said, and leased a global network of servers to hide their movements.
The hackers are aware of the existence of corporate social networks, according to the indictment. They also turned their corporate websites into malicious sites that would have compromised the computers of anyone who visited them, law enforcement officials said.
From November 2013 to February 2014, they also groomed Mr. Tian and Mr. Gu, employees in the French aerospace company's China office, to work with Chinese intelligence officers, according to the indictment.
Mr. Tian is a malicious software developer, using his computer systems for the Chinese intelligence officials, according to short documents.
Mr. Gu, his office of head of information technology and security, told Chinese intelligence officers that the law enforcement officials said the presence of malware in the company's systems, prosecutors said. The warning allowed the conspirators to try to hide their identities.
Mr. Zhang was also instructed in a separate case of Chinese and other citizens of the United States. John C. Demers, the head of the National Security Division at the agency.
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