The US has charged a Chinese businessman with hacking into the computers of Boeing and other defence contractors in order to download information about military aircraft, the latest example of what US officials believe to be a long-running Chinese campaign of industrial espionage.
Su Bin, who is based in Canada, conspired with two other individuals to steal the data from company computers and tried to sell the data to contacts in China, according to an indictment which was unsealed in a federal court in Los Angeles on Friday.
The charges come as US secretary of state John Kerry criticised Chinese cyber-hacking during a US-China summit this week, which he said was “threatening our national competitiveness”.