NEW DELHI: Chinese hackers are believed to be snooping on information related to the Sino-India border dispute and Tibetan exile groups in India since 2012, Press Trust of India said from Beijing on Friday.

Quoting a US-based cyber-security firm, it said the hackers were detected in April ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to China in May and they are still conducting attacks.

One advanced team has been zeroing in on organisations there to steal information related to border disputes and Tibetan exile groups, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post quoted a FireEye statement as saying.

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“Over the past four years, this threat group has (targeted) over 100 victims, approximately 70 per cent of which were in India,” it said.

In April, FireEye had reported that a separate Chinese hacking team, APT30, had been spying on governments and businesses in Southeast Asia and India uninterrupted for a decade, echoing claims made by researchers at US firm McAfee in 2011, PTI said.

China had strongly refuted such allegations in April. “I want to stress that the Chinese government firmly bans and crackdown on all forms of hacker attacks,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei had said in response to the allegations by FireEye.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2015

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