China targeted European lawmakers with cyberattacks, Washington says

Dozens of European lawmakers have been targeted by Chinese cyberattacks in the past few years, according to prosecutors in the United States.

Late Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an indictment saying that Chinese hackers with links to the national spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, targeted “every European Union member” of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a coalition of lawmakers critical of Beijing.

Hackers in 2021 sent "more than 1,000 emails to more than 400 unique accounts of individuals associated with IPAC" to try to gather data on members' internet activities and digital devices, the indictment said.

Some 66 EU lawmakers from national parliaments could be identified from IPAC’s website. Members come from 12 EU countries as well as the U.K., Ukraine, the U.S. and others.

There are two members of the European Parliament — Germany's Reinhard Bütikofer and Slovakia's Miriam Lexmann — listed as IPAC co-chairs. Another 17 MEPs are part of the group as members.

However, the European Parliament insisted through a spokesperson that its own lawmakers weren’t targeted, “according to all elements of information currently available,” POLITICO's Brussels Playbook reported.

The U.K. and U.S. took action in response on Monday, with London imposing sanctions and authorities in the U.S. launching legal action. But on the Continent, news that Chinese state-sponsored hackers stole millions of voters’ data and launched cyberattacks against lawmakers was met with collective near-silence.

Samuel Cogolati, a Belgian Green MP and co-chair of IPAC, told Playbook he was targeted back in 2021, the same year Beijing sanctioned him, alongside other EU lawmakers including Bütikofer and Lexmann.

The cyberattacks were only brought to Cogolati’s attention in 2023, via an email from the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium. In the email, seen by Brussels Playbook, the Belgian cyber body said the hackers were part of APT31, the same group now hit by Britain’s fresh sanctions.

“It is absolutely ridiculous to find out about all the other victims of Chinese cyberattacks in Belgium and across Europe through an indictment — issued by the U.S. DoJ,” Cogolati said.

U.S. prosecutors said in their indictment that the Chinese hacking group had conducted cyberattacks on American political and state officials since at least 2015, including by posing as prominent American journalists to trick victims into clicking links that extract information on their whereabouts and digital devices.

The hackers used more harmful software tools in other campaigns targeted at the U.S.; the indictment did not say these tools were used against European targets in the 2021 email campaign targeted at IPAC members.