50-year-old Chinese national Su Bin faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for his involvement in a plot to steal information pertaining to fighter jets intended for use by US military forces.
Bin, a businessman involved in the aviation and aerospace sector, worked with two people in China between October 2008 and March 2014 to break into aircraft manufacturer Boeing’s Orange County systems and other networks.
The team sought to access sensitive military information about C-17 strategic transport aircraft and a number of fighter jets designed for American military forces.
Bin pointed his co-conspirators to the relevant networks to attack and guided them to files that contained sensitive information. Once they obtained the data, Bin would translate the English contents to Chinese for their final beneficiaries.
The US Department of Justice didn’t say who it believed was buying the information from Bin, but it’s possible that he hoped to sell it to the Chinese government.
Bin was arrested in Canada in July 2014 and has pleaded guilty to the charges he faces in this case. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 13, 2016.
➤ Chinese National Pleads Guilty to Conspiring to Hack into U.S. Defense Contractors’ Systems to Steal Sensitive Military Information [The United States Department of Justice]
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