A man accused of conducting cyberattacks on behalf of the Chinese government has been extradited to the United States and faces more than a decade in prison if convicted.
Last year, the US Department of Justice accused Xu Zewei of working as a contractor for China’s Ministry of State Security to carry out a series of cyberattacks. Prosecutors alleged that Xu and co-conspirator Zhang Yu targeted several US universities in early 2020 to steal research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The two also reportedly hacked thousands of email servers running Microsoft Exchange since March 2021 as part of a “stealth” campaign attributed to a Chinese-backed hacking group known as Hafniumand later Silk Typhoon.
Xu was arrested in Italy last year at the request of US authorities. His lawyer in Italy, Simona Candido, told TechCrunch that Xu was extradited to the United States on Saturday and is now in custody in Houston, Texas.
According to the US Bureau of Prisons website, a man with the same name is being held at the Federal Detention Center in Houston.
After this story was published, the Justice Department was announced Xu’s version in a press release.
Xu’s lawyer in the United States, Dan Cogdell, was scheduled to appear at a hearing in Houston on Monday, according to court records. Cogdell told TechCrunch he learned of the hearing earlier Monday.
According to court records, Xu appeared for his initial appearance in federal court and was remanded in custody.
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As the Department of Justice said when initially announced charges against the accused hackers, Xu allegedly worked for the Shanghai Powerock Network, a company in China that prosecutors said “conducted hacking” for Beijing. Xu and other hackers reported their activities directly to Chinese state officials in Shanghai.
Along with Zhang, he was part of the Hafnium team that allegedly exploited previously undiscovered security flaws in Microsoft Exchange servers to hack into several US organizations, including defense contractors, law firms, think tanks and infectious disease researchers.
According to prosecutors, the Hafnium hackers targeted more than 60,000 entities in the US and managed to breach more than 12,700 of them.
The Chinese embassy in Washington, DC did not respond to a request for comment.
The Financial Times was mentioned that the Chinese Foreign Ministry opposed Xu’s extradition and accused the US government of “making up cases”.
For years, the US government has indicted suspected Chinese hackers, many of whom remain at large. In 2022, Yanjun Xu was convicted to 20 years in prison for piracy crimes in what the Justice Department said was the first case in which a Chinese government official had been extradited to the United States.
This story has been updated to include the DOJ’s announcement of Xu’s extradition and information from new court records.
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