China back to spying on and stealing from American businesses amid raging trade war

• Security experts believe that the Xi-Obama cyber-truce has been all but obliterated as the US and China continue to be locked in an increasingly concerning trade war.
• Some believe that the drop in China’s cyberespionage activities against the US was due to internal power shifts, rather than due to a desire to adhere to the 2015 Xi-Obama truce.

Just three years after the US and China came to a historic agreement to cease all cyberwarfare against each other, China appears to be back to hacking, spying on and stealing from American businesses. Security experts believe that the Xi-Obama cyber-truce has been all but obliterated as the US and China continue to be locked in an increasingly concerning trade war.

"It had a marked impact on the way that the Chinese were behaving. We have certainly seen the behavior erode in the last year, and we are very concerned with those troubling trends,” former White House security chief and ex-NSA official Rob Joyce said of the Obama-Xi agreement, the Register reported. The comments were made at the Aspen Cyber Summit in San Francisco on November 8.

However, some security experts that the drop in China’s cyberespionage activities against US was due to internal power shifts, rather than due to a desire to adhere to the 2015 Xi-Obama truce.

"We were tracking those Chinese threat actors. They didn't cease to exist, but they were just hacking Chinese companies,” Crowdstrike CTO and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch said, the Register reported.

According to Symantec CEO Greg Clark, China is now hacking US entities with a renewed vengeance. He added that one of Symantec’s clients was targeted by Chinese hackers recently and the attack has resulted in the firm reportedly completely abandon work on a new generation of products since they believe that the Chinese hackers may have comprehensively stolen the blueprints of the products.

"I had a very large corporate manufacturer come into our office and say 'we have stopped trying to protect it, it has all been stolen, we want to innovate faster'," Clark said, the Register reported.