China’s Ministry of State Security claims American intelligence agency stole sensitive data and attacked the center’s internal networks

Zhang Tongin, Beijing
Published: 2:04pm, 19 Oct 2025

China’s top counter-espionage agency has accused the United States of conducting cyberattacks against the country’s national time center, which it said could have had a severe impact on the orderly functioning of society.

In a social media post on Sunday, the Ministry of State Security said the US National Security Agency was behind a number of cyberattacks against China’s National Time Service Center.

The center – affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and based in Xian, Shaanxi province – is responsible for generating and distributing China’s standard time.

It also provides highly precise timing services for the country’s communications, finance, power, transport, mapping and defense sectors.

The US embassy in China did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Sunday’s statement, the ministry said the cyberattacks against the time center were “long-term, highly covert, and employed state-level cyberespionage tools”.

It said the NSA had exploited a security flaw that allowed it to secretly take control of the foreign-brand mobile phones of several staff at the time center and steal sensitive data.

According to the ministry this began in March 2022. In April the following year, it said the American intelligence agency began using stolen passwords to break into the time center’s computer systems and study its network.

The ministry said the cyberattacks intensified from August 2023 to June 2024. It claimed the NSA had used a new cyberwarfare platform with 42 specialized weapons to attack internal networks of the Chinese time center. It said the US agency had also tried to break into China’s high-precision ground-based timing system, which it claimed was done to potentially disrupt it later.

According to the statement, Chinese cybersecurity authorities had found that most of the US attacks had occurred late at night or in the early hours of the morning, Beijing time. It said the NSA had used virtual servers located in the United States, Europe and Asia as “springboards” to conceal the origin of the attacks, along with strong encryption algorithms.

The ministry said China’s state security agencies had found evidence of the attacks and guided the National Time Service Center to investigate, cut off the attack chains and upgrade its protocols to prevent future security breaches.

Li Jianhua, director of the National Engineering Laboratory for Information Content Analysis Technology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday that US intelligence agencies were using a number of “springboard” servers in Europe, Asia, Africa, and countries surrounding China.

He said during their infiltration attempts, they frequently exploited “zero-day vulnerabilities” – or security flaws – so they could bypass intrusion detection systems in critical information networks.

“This type of cyberattack is considered a classic form of state-level cyber aggression, internationally referred to as an advanced persistent threat,” Li told the broadcaster.

“Its objectives include infiltrating, monitoring, disrupting or even destroying key infrastructure in other countries – posing a severe threat to any nation.”

Wei Dong, a senior official at the National Time Service Center, said in the same report that timing services were crucial – and even the tiniest error could lead to major problems.

He said if timing was a millisecond off it could cause a chain reaction of failures at power substations, leading to widespread blackouts.

According to Wei, if timing was a microsecond off it could trigger fluctuations to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars on international stock markets.

He told the broadcaster that if timing were out by a nanosecond it would throw off the BeiDou satellite navigation system by 30cm (11.8 inches) and disrupt mobile phone and internet services.

And he said even a picosecond off could result in a lunar spacecraft’s position being miscalculated by several kilometers, potentially preventing it from returning to Earth.