China has accused the U.S. of continuously hacking Huawei’s servers and conducting cyberattacks to steal other critical data since 2009, the latest salvo between Beijing and Washington as tensions further escalate. China’s Ministry of State Security on Wednesday released a post on its official WeChat account titled “Revealing key despicable methods by U.S. intelligence agencies in cyberespionage and theft.” The post explicitly points to U.S. government efforts against Chinese national tech champion Huawei Technologies. It also accuses Washington of having big, influential tech companies install backdoors in software, applications and equipment so it can steal vital data from countries including China and Russia. “In 2009, the Office of Tailored Access Operations started to infiltrate servers at Huawei’s headquarters and continued conducting such surveillance operations,” the post says. The U.S. Department of State has yet to respond to a request for comment. As geopolitical tensions mount, the U.S. and China have been expanding their global spying operations. The Wall Street Journal in July reported that Beijing-linked hackers had accessed the email account of the U.S. ambassador to China in an operation that is believed to have exposed hundreds of emails. Wednesday’s post says China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center extracted spyware called Second Date while investigating a cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an that reportedly occurred last year. The ministry found that Second Date is “cyberespionage malware developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, which operates covertly in thousands of networks in many countries around the world.”
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