A hacker who allegedly carried out cyberattacks on behalf of China has been extradited to the United States

A man accused of carrying out cyberattacks on behalf of the Chinese government has been extradited to the United States, according to his lawyer.

Last year, the US Department of Justice The accused, Xu Ziwei To act as a contractor for the Chinese Ministry of State Security to conduct a series of cyber attacks. Prosecutors alleged that Xu and his partner Zhang Yu targeted several US universities in early 2020 to steal research related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The two are also alleged to have hacked thousands of email servers running Microsoft Exchange starting in March 2021, as part of a “random” campaign attributed to a Chinese-backed hacking group known as Hafniumand then Silk Hurricane.

Shaw was arrested in Italy last year at the request of the American authorities. His lawyer in Italy, Simona Candido, told TechCrunch that Shaw was extradited to the United States on Saturday, and is now being detained in Houston, Texas.

According to the US Bureau of Prisons website, a man with the same name is being held at the Federal Detention Center in Houston.

Dan Cogdill, Shaw’s U.S. attorney, is scheduled to appear at a hearing in Houston on Monday, according to court records. Cogdell told TechCrunch that he learned of the hearing earlier Monday.

Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Texas, which is prosecuting Xu’s case, acknowledged receiving the email but did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions about Xu.

As the Ministry of Justice said when She initially announced the charges Against the accused hackers, Xu allegedly worked for Shanghai Powerock Network, a company in China that prosecutors said “hacked” for Beijing. Xu and other hackers allegedly reported their activities directly to Chinese state officials in Shanghai.

Along with Zhang, he was part of the Hafnium group that allegedly took advantage of previously undiscovered security flaws in Microsoft Exchange servers with the aim of… Hacking several American organizationsincluding defense contractors, law firms, think tanks, and infectious disease researchers.

According to prosecutors, Hafnium hackers targeted more than 60,000 entities in the United States and successfully compromised more than 12,700 of them.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.

Financial Times I mentioned The Chinese Foreign Ministry opposed Xu’s extradition and accused the US government of “fabricating cases.”

For years, the US government has brought charges against suspected Chinese hackers, many of whom remain at large. In 2022, Yangon Show He was sentenced He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for hacking crimes, in what the Justice Department said was the first case in which a Chinese government intelligence officer had been extradited to the United States.