Two suspects in China targeted companies working on vaccines as part of a broader cybertheft campaign to enrich themselves and aid the Chinese government, officials said.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department accused a pair of Chinese hackers on Tuesday of targeting vaccine development on behalf of the country’s intelligence service as part of a broader yearslong campaign of global cybertheft aimed at industries such as defense contractors, high-end manufacturing and solar energy companies.

Justice Department officials labeled the suspects, Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi, as a blended threat who sometimes worked on behalf of China’s spy services and sometimes to enrich themselves. The officials said that an indictment secured against them this month and unsealed on Tuesday was the first to target such a threat.

United States government officials said that the suspects had previously stolen information about other Chinese intelligence targets like human rights activists and, at the behest of the Ministry of State Security spy service, shifted focus this year to trying to acquire coronavirus vaccine research.

The indictment comes as the Trump administration has stepped up its criticism of Beijing, both for its theft of secrets and its failure to contain the spread of the coronavirus, and is a significant escalation of that campaign to denounce Beijing. The Justice Department said that China’s covert activity could potentially set back vaccine research efforts.

The accusations also came days after the United States and allied countries accused Russia of trying to steal information on vaccine development.

The indictment also suggests that China did far less to curb its spying than it had vowed to as part of a nonaggression pactsigned with the United States in late 2015 that was aimed at curbing China’s efforts to steal American technological know-how.

By: Julian E. Barnes

nytimes.com