Wall Street Journal: Some of China’s scrappiest hackers-for-hire are evolving into full-service private intelligence agencies, exploiting advances in artificial intelligence and other technologies to put stolen secrets of foreign governments at the fingertips of the country’s security agencies.
…The material turns the table on hackers by providing an inside view of how they operate. It shows the company, Zhengzhou Zhirong Network Technology Co., or ZRON, offering a menu of sensitive data that is presented as coming from the government email systems of China’s rivals and friends alike. Documents in the trove include Russian diplomatic correspondence, preparations for foreign leaders’ visits to the Philippines and confidential minutes from a meeting in the Pakistan prime minister’s office.
The trove seen by the Journal also contains intelligence reports that appear to be based in part on stolen data, internal company chat logs and a company slide deck that appears aimed at prospective clients…