THE interior of the I Soon office, also known as Anxun in Mandarin, is seen after office hours in Chengdu in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province on February 20, 2024.
Leaked chat records show I-Soon executives wooing officials over lavish dinners and late night binge drinking. They collude with competitors to rig bidding for government contracts. They pay thousands of dollars in “introduction fees” to contacts that bring them lucrative projects. I-Soon has not commented on the documents.
Wu and some other hackers distinguished themselves by declaring themselves “red hackers”—patriots who offered their services to the Chinese Communist Party, in contrast to the freewheeling, anarchist and anti-establishment ethos popular among many coders. For a couple of years, the intrusions subsided. But I-Soon and other private hacking outfits soon grew more active than ever, providing Chinese state security forces cover and deniability. I-Soon is “part of an ecosystem of contractors that has links to the Chinese patriotic hacking scene,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst of Google’s Mandiant cybersecurity unit.
One, Chinese cybersecurity giant Qi Anxin, was especially loathed, despite being one of I-Soon’s key investors and business partners. For example, chat records show China’s Ministry of Public Security gave companies access to proofs of concept of so-called “zero days”, the industry term for a previously unknown software security hole. Zero days are prized because they can be exploited until detected. I-Soon company executives debated how to obtain them. They are regularly discovered at an annual Chinese state-sponsored hacking competition.
A Chinese state body, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also owns a small stake in I-Soon through a Tibetan investment fund, Chinese corporate records show. I-Soon lost money and struggled with cash flow issues, falling behind on payments to subcontractors. In the past few years, the pandemic hit China’s economy, causing police to pull back on spending that hurt I-Soon’s bottom line. “The government has no money,” I-Soon’s COO wrote in 2020.
“China is no longer the country we used to know. A lot of highly skilled people have been leaving,” said one industry insider, declining to be named to speak on a sensitive topic. Under Xi, the person added, the growing role of the state in China’s technology industry has emphasized ideology over competence, impeded pay and made access to officials pivotal.