New Report Links Research Firms BIETA and CIII to China’s MSS Cyber Operations

According to The Hacker News, a Chinese company named the Beijing Institute of Electronics Technology and Application (BIETA) has been assessed as likely led by the Ministry of State Security (MSS), with evidence linking at least four BIETA personnel to MSS officers and to the University of International Relations. The four individuals named are Wu Shizhong, He Dequan, You Xingang, and Zhou Linna, and BIETA’s subsidiary Beijing Sanxin Times Technology Co., Ltd.

(CIII) is also implicated in research, development and sale of technologies that presumably support intelligence and other MSS-related missions. The report notes BIETA and CIII have worked on steganography methods that could support covert communications and malware deployment, while also developing forensic and counterintelligence tools and acquiring foreign technologies for various security applications.

According to information shared on BIETA’s site, BIETA describes itself as a research and development institution focusing on communications, multimedia processing and security technologies, with roots dating back to 1983, and CIII has produced several network and security-related applications. The Mastercard-owned company mentioned in the piece said BIETA and CIII are “almost certainly” part of front organisations that contribute to cyber-enabled intelligence operations for Beijing and its proxies.