Fledging cooperation between the United States and China on fighting cybercrime has ground to a halt since the recent US indictment of Chinese military officials on hacking charges, a senior US security official said on Thursday.
At the same time, there has been no decline in Chinese hackers’ efforts to break into US networks, the official said.
In May, the Justice Department charged five Chinese military members with hacking the systems of US companies to steal trade secrets, prompting Beijing to suspend a Sino-US working group on cyber issues. China denies the charges and has in turn accused Washington of massive cyber spying.
US and Chinese officials had started working together to combat certain types of online crime, including money laundering, child pornography and drug trafficking, the US official said. But that cooperation has stopped.
“We are in time out,” the official said. “They don’t want to talk to us. Everything is really cold.”
Asked whether attempts to hack into US networks that originate in China had slowed, the official said: “They have been very active and this hasn’t changed a bit.”
The new chill underscores the fragility of the efforts to ease tensions and mutual accusations of hacking and internet theft between China and the United States, at the expense of the security areas where the nations had reached some understanding.