Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Yu tptw/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
IN AN UNUSUAL MOVE, the Chinese government has publicized the names and issued bounties for individuals it claims to be Taiwanese hackers who are members of the Information, Communications, and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The national identification numbers of the purported hackers are also listed. A paltry 10,000 yuan is named as the bounty per individual.
In particular, the Chinese government claims that hackers working for the Taiwanese government are responsible for cyberattacks on a technology company in Guangzhou. This took place as part of a larger series of attacks, according to Chinese authorities. The cyberattacks are claimed to have targeted ten provinces overall and affected electricity, water, and other services, aiming to gather technical data and other information. While China has framed Taiwan as behind the attacks, Chinese authorities state that hackers used VPN with IP locations from the US, France, Japan, and other locations, and that cyberattacks from Taiwan are increasingly common.
According to CEFCOM spokesman Colonel Hu Chin-lung, most of the individuals listed by China have already retired from the military and the photos released by the Chinese government are dated. These include photos that could have been from when the individuals were students. It is less clear how China came to possess the national ID numbers of such individuals, but this could have taken place through tracking leaks of the National Health Insurance database between 2009 and 2022.
This is not the first time that China has claimed Taiwan to be responsible for cyberattacks against it. In late 2024, China claimed that the Taiwanese government was behind a series of cyberattacks on Chinese government websites, defacing them with messages critical of the Chinese government. The Chinese government claimed this to be the doing of a group called “Anonymous 64,” which it claims is a front for ICEFCOM’s Cyber Warfare Unit. ICEFCOM is a section of the Taiwanese military that deals with information warfare, cybersecurity, and information management.
Chinese-led disinformation efforts also portrayed Taiwan as behind the Milk Tea Alliance. to depict the Milk Tea Alliance phenomenon as deliberately engineered by the Taiwanese government in collaboration with the American government. The Milk Tea Alliance refers to online exchanges between netizens from Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong, often mocking the authoritarianism of the Chinese government. The attempt, then, was to frame the Milk Tea Alliance as along the lines of being an American-engineered “color revolution.” Disinformation to create this perception involved creating false documents indicating correspondence between Taiwanese authorities and American government officials, coordinating efforts at providing aid to students in Thailand.
More generally, China has tried to frame Taiwan as behind nefarious activity directed against it. Around the 2019 Hong Kong protests, as China leaned into claims that external forces were orchestrating the protests, China claimed to have arrested tens of thousands of Chinese spies. This does not seem to be a true claim, as though there are Taiwanese detained in China over their political activity, the Taiwanese government did not report Taiwanese to be missing in China in such large numbers.
China has increasingly targeted specific individuals in the past few years, mostly individuals it frames as diehard Taiwanese independence activists and has named publicly. Likewise, as can be observed, China has increasingly framed itself as the victim of aggression from Taiwan rather than the other way around, seeing as Taiwan experiences tens of thousands of cyberattacks from China every year. Some experts take the view that China is aiming to construct a narrative of victimhood as casus belli in the event of war, much as occurred in Ukraine with claims by Russia that it is seeking to de-Nazify Ukraine and protect Russians in Ukraine. China has also become increasingly prone to offering bounties against individuals politically at odds with it, such as with regards to a growing number of Hong Kong activists abroad.
Still, it is a new move for China to name individual members of the military as targets. Though it’s taking aim at purported hackers and publicizing their names, images, and national IDs is intended to send a signal about the vulnerability of Taiwanese databases, it is to be seen if China increasingly moves toward naming and publicizing individual military personnel.