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Norway Accuses China of Cyber-attack

Norway has accused China of carrying out a major cyber-attack. The attack has affected at least 30,000 organizations globally including Norwegian state and business institutions earlier this year.

Norway is among many European countries that accuse China of cyber-attacks. China denies the allegations.It is a serious attack that affected our most important democratic institution, says Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide.

On 10 March, Norwegian Parliemanet (Stortinget) announced data breaches in its e-mail systems. The hack was performed by exploiting security holes in the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server. The Foreign Ministry now says that China was behind the attack.

Several of our allies, the EU and Microsoft have also confirmed this. Chinese authorities must prevent such attacks from taking place so that similar incidents do not happen again, says Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide in the press release.
She states that the Chinese embassy was called to a meeting earlier yesterday, but does not want to go into what was said in that meeting.

In a statement to NRK, the Chinese embassy says that they hope Norway can provide facts and evidence to find out the truth.
Furthermore, the embassy claims that China is a defender of cybersecurity and has worked against this type of behavior.
PST is still investigating

Such malicious cyber-activity is not in line with the norms for responsible state behavior in the digital space that all UN member states have agreed to. We have today summoned the Chinese embassy and taken up the matter directly, says the foreign minister.

PST informs NRK that their investigation of the attack is still going on. Beyond that, they do not want to comment on the current statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Norway is not the only country that has accused China of the attacks. The EU, the United Kingdom, the United States, and NATO have also stated that actors associated with the Chinese state’s Ministry of Security were behind the attacks in which the Storting was one of the victims.

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