The United States government is offering financial rewards in its efforts to apprehend Chinese state-sponsored hackers who infiltrated the systems of the U.S. Treasury Department earlier this month.
Guan Tianfeng, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is being sought for his involvement in a conspiracy to hack indiscriminately into firewall devices worldwide in 2020, the US Officials said.
It said Guan and his co-conspirators worked at the offices of Sichuan Silence Information Technology Co. Ltd. to discover and exploit a previously unknown vulnerability in certain firewalls sold by U.K.-based Sophos Ltd.
Sophos is an information technology company that develops and markets cybersecurity products.
The malware that exploited the vulnerability discovered by Guan was designed to steal information from infected computers and to encrypt files on them if a victim attempted to remediate the infection.
Guan and his co-conspirators infected approximately 81,000 firewall devices worldwide, including a firewall device used by an agency in the United States.
The FBI is offering US$10 million for information about the 30-year-old, his company, or their alleged hacking activities.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington rejected any responsibility for the hack in a response to Reuters, saying that Beijing “firmly opposes the US’s smear attacks against China without any factual basis”.
