BEIJING: A Chinese tech security firm was able to breach foreign governments, infiltrate social media accounts and hack personal computers, a massive data leak analysed by experts this week has revealed.The trove of documents from I-Soon, a private contractor that competed for Chinese government contracts, shows that its hackers compromised more than a dozen governments, according to cybersecurity firms SentinelLabs and Malwarebytes.I-Soon also breached “democracy organisations” in China’s semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong, universities and the NATO military alliance, SentinelLabs researchers wrote Wednesday.The leaked data, the contents of which AFP was unable to immediately identify, was posted last week on the online software repository GitHub by an unknown individual.”The leak provides some of the most concrete details seen publicly to date, revealing the maturing nature of China’s cyber espionage ecosystem,” SentinelLabs analysts said.I-Soon was able to breach government offices in India, Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, among others, Malwarebytes said in a separate post on Wednesday.I-Soon’s website was not available Thursday morning, though an internet archive snapshot of the site from Tuesday says it is based in Shanghai, with subsidiaries and offices in Beijing, Sichuan, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.It contains files showing chatlogs, presentations and lists of targets, analysts said.



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