China steals as much as $600 billion in intellectual property from the U.S. every year through a vast network of hackers and analysts — including a 2009 breach of Boeing Co.'s computers that stole detailed information on the company's new C-17 aircraft, according to a new book.
Boeing, based in Seattle, had been developing the C-17 from the 1980s to the 1990s — at a $40 billion cost to American taxpayers — in Long Beach, California, author Bill Gertz says in the book, "Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy."
Gertz is the national security reporter for The Washington Times, where the book was excerpted Tuesday.
Ultimately, Boeing built 280 C-17 aircraft, at an average cost of $202 million each, and the Chinese unveiled its version — built with data from as many as 85,000 stolen files — in November 2018, within a decade after the heist.
The extensive Chinese hacking operation — which employed sophisticated "spear phishing" tactics using a popular hacking software known as "PoisonIvy" — was exposed by Trump administration officials in 2018, according to the book.
A PoisonIvy email was intercepted by the National Security Agency, leading to the 2014 arrest and conviction of a major Chinese "cyber espionage actor" named Su Bin, or Stephen Su.
In 2016, a federal judge sentenced Su Bin, a Chinese national, to 46 months in prison and ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine. Under a plea agreement signed earlier that year, Su, then 51, faced a maximum of five years in federal prison.
"The case of Su Bin would reveal for the first time the Chinese military's relentless drive to steal American weapons know-how from defense contractors such as Boeing to build up its forces for the ultimate defeat of 'American imperialism' — the term used by China in many of its internal communications to describe the Communist Party of China's main enemy, the United States," Gertz says.
Chinese unfair trade practices and Beijing's intellectual property theft, according to the Trump administration reports, cost Americans from $225 billion to $600 billion a year in lost information.
"The Chinese have a sophisticated network of tens of thousands of human spies and computer hackers targeting American military and technological secrets," Michelle Van Cleave, a former top U.S. counterintelligence official within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, says in the book.
"What they can't acquire legally through trade, or creatively through mergers and acquisitions, they are prepared to steal," she added. "And it's getting harder all the time to stop them."
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