LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) - U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.
Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers. While inverters are built to allow remote access for updates and maintenance, the utility companies that use them typically install firewalls to prevent direct communication back to China.
However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.
Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.
Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at. The rogue components provide additional, undocumented communication channels that could allow firewalls to be circumvented remotely, with potentially catastrophic consequences, the two people said.
Both declined to be named because they did not have permission to speak to the media.
"We know that China believes there is value in placing at least some elements of our core infrastructure at risk of destruction or disruption," said Mike Rogers, a former director of the U.S. National Security Agency. "I think that the Chinese are, in part, hoping that the widespread use of inverters limits the options that the West has to deal with the security issue."
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said: "We oppose the generalisation of the concept of national security, distorting and smearing China's infrastructure achievements."
EclecticIQ analysts assess with high confidence that, in April 2025, China-nexus nation-state APTs (advanced persistent threat) launched high-temp exploitation campaigns against critical infrastructure networks by targeting SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer. Actors leveraged CVE-2025-31324 [1], an unauthenticated file upload vulnerability that enables remote code execution (RCE). This assessment is based on a publicly exposed directory (opendir) found on attacker-controlled infrastructure, which contained detailed event logs capturing operations across multiple compromised systems.
EclecticIQ analysts link observed SAP NetWeaver intrusions to Chinese cyber-espionage units including UNC5221 [2], UNC5174 [3], and CL-STA-0048 [4] based on threat actor tradecrafts patterns. Mandiant and Palo Alto researchers assess that these groups connect to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) or affiliated private entities. These actors operate strategically to compromise critical infrastructures, exfiltrate sensitive data, and maintain persistent access across high-value networks worldwide.
Uncategorized China-Nexus Threat Actor Scanning the Internet for CVE-2025-31324 and Upload Webshells
EclecticIQ analysts assess with high confidence that, a very likely China-nexus threat actor is conducting a widespread internet scanning and exploitation campaign against SAP NetWeaver systems. Threat actor–controlled server hosted at IP address 15.204.56[.]106 exposed the scope of the SAP NetWeaver intrusions [5].
Dior’s coveted client list of China’s wealthiest and most powerful consumers has been compromised in a major data breach, forcing the French luxury giant to issue an apology as it scrambles to contain potential fallout and limit any damage to its reputation.
The luxury brand under French conglomerate LVMH experienced a customer data breach in China on May 7. According to a text message sent to customers yesterday, the company disclosed that an unauthorized external party had gained access to its database, obtaining sensitive personal information such as customers’ names, gender, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, purchase amounts, and shopping preferences.
Dior emphasized that the compromised data did not include bank account details, IBANs (International Bank Account Numbers), or credit card information. Nonetheless, the brand urged customers to exercise heightened caution, advising them to beware of phishing messages, unsolicited calls or emails, and to avoid clicking on suspicious links or disclosing personal information.
This report highlights a rarely-discussed but crucially important attack surface: security vendors themselves.
A Chinese startup, Sand AI, appears to be blocking certain politically sensitive images from its online video generation tool.
A China-based startup, Sand AI, has released an openly licensed, video-generating AI model that’s garnered praise from entrepreneurs like the founding director of Microsoft Research Asia, Kai-Fu Lee. But Sand AI appears to be censoring the hosted version of its model to block images that might raise the ire of Chinese regulators from the hosted version of the model, according to TechCrunch’s testing.
Earlier this week, Sand AI announced Magi-1, a model that generates videos by “autoregressively” predicting sequences of frames. The company claims the model can generate high-quality, controllable footage that captures physics more accurately than rival open models.
China on Tuesday accused three alleged employees of the U.S. National Security Agency of carrying out cyberattacks on the Asian Winter Games in February.
China admitted in a secret meeting with U.S. officials that it conducted Volt Typhoon cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, WSJ reports.
China reportedly admitted in a secret meeting with U.S. officials that it carried out cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, linked to the Volt Typhoon campaign.
The hackers compromised home routers made by Zyxel to gain entry into a “major” telecommunications company's environment.
The ubiquitous ESP32 microchip made by Chinese manufacturer Espressif and used by over 1 billion units as of 2023 contains an undocumented
Silk Typhoon is a Chinese state actor focused on espionage campaigns targeting a wide range of industries in the US and throughout the world. In recent months, Silk Typhoon has shifted to performing IT supply chain attacks to gain access to targets. In this blog, we provide an overview of the threat actor along with insight into their recent activity as well as their longstanding tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), including a persistent interest in the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in various public-facing appliances and moving from on-premises to cloud environments.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., today, unsealed two separate indictments that allege Chinese nationals Yin Kecheng, 38, (尹 可成) a/k/a “YKC” (“YIN”) and Zhou Shuai, 45, (周帅) a/k/a “Coldface” (“ZHOU”) violated various federal statutes by participating in years-long, sophisticated computer hacking conspiracies that successfully targeted a wide variety of U.S.-based victims
Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it’s sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country, potentially setting the stage for greater scrutiny.
Chinese hackers breached the US government office that reviews foreign investments for national security risks, three US officials familiar with the matter told CNN.
The theft, which has not previously been reported, underscores Beijing’s keen interest in spying on a US government office that has broad powers to block Chinese investment in the US as tensions between the world’s two superpowers remain high.
The breach was part of a broader incursion by the hackers into the Treasury Department’s unclassified system. The office targeted by the hackers, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), in December gained greater authority to scrutinize real estate sales near US military bases. US lawmakers and national security officials have grown increasingly worried that the Chinese government or its proxies could use land acquisitions to spy on those bases.
More U.S. companies have been added to the list of telecommunications firms hacked in a wave of breaches by a Chinese state-backed threat group tracked as Salt Typhoon.
Massive ‘Typhoon’ cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure and telecoms sought to lay groundwork for potential conflict with Beijing, as intruders gathered data and got in position to impede response and sow chaos
U.S. officials say the sanctioned Chinese firm provided botnet infrastructure for the China-backed hacking group Flax Typhoon
A suspected Chinese hacking campaign that began in November is exploiting a vulnerability in Palo Alto firewalls to install a custom malware backdoor for espionage.
The department notified lawmakers of the episode, which it said was linked to a state-sponsored actor in China.
In a letter informing lawmakers of the episode, the Treasury Department said that it had been notified on Dec. 8 by a third-party software service company, BeyondTrust, that the hacker had obtained a security key that allowed it to remotely gain access to certain Treasury workstations and documents on them
Treasury officials attributed the December theft of unclassified documents to China.
The Treasury said it was notified on December 8 by BeyondTrust, a company that provides identity access and remote support tech for large organizations and government departments, that hackers had “gained access to a key used by the vendor” for providing remote access technical support to Treasury employees. BeyondTrust disclosed the incident at the time, but did not say how the key was obtained.
