Financial Times
Gina Chon in Washington
July 26, 2015
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The FBI has labelled China “the most dominant threat” to US companies, saying it believed Beijing was the main culprit behind a 53 per cent jump in economic espionage cases its agents are investigating.
FBI officials warned on Thursday that hundreds of billions of dollars were now being lost every year from the theft of trade secrets, intellectual property, sales and pricing information and other company data, posing a national security threat to the US.
“China is the most dominant threat we face from economic espionage,” said Randall Coleman, assistant director of the agency’s counterintelligence unit. “The Chinese government plays a significant role. The playing field is not level.”
The FBI on Thursday launched a campaign to educate businesses about the threat, saying economic espionage cases now number in the hundreds each year.
It released a video called “The Company Man: Protecting America’s Secrets”, based on a real case in which two Chinese citizens attempted to steal insulation technology from a US company.
The suspects used social media, online job ads and head hunters, and proposed a joint venture to try to connect with employees and steal the information. They were caught after an employee agreed to help catch them.
The video has been shown privately about 1,300 times to companies over the past year as part of the FBI’s outreach programme. Agents urged businesses to work with the bureau to address the threat.
In an FBI survey of 165 companies, 50 per cent acknowledged that trade secrets or intellectual property had been stolen and 95 per cent suspected China was behind the thefts, said William Evanina, counterintelligence executive at the office of the director of national intelligence.
Information on military telecoms, precious metals, hybrid technology, seed and grain hybrids, paint technology and financial institution data are among targets.
Spear phishing campaigns are also used, in which employees click on links in fake emails that install malware or other malicious software.
In May US authorities charged three Tianjin University professors and three other Chinese citizens with economic espionage, claiming they had stolen sensitive US technology to help Chinese universities and government-controlled companies.
They were accused of stealing information about a technology used in smartphones, tablets and GPS devices from Skyworks Solutions in Massachusetts and Avago Technologies in Colorado. The technology also has military applications.
In 2014 five Chinese soldiers were indicted over cyber attacks and economic espionage on US companies.
