One of the methods is to pretend to be John Moolenaar.
The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is reporting “an ongoing series of highly targeted cyber-espionage campaigns that we have concluded are linked to the Chinese Communist Party. These campaigns seek to compromise organizations and individuals involved in U.S.–China trade policy and diplomacy, including U.S. government agencies, U.S. business organizations, D.C. law firms and think tanks, and at least one foreign government.”
I’m not yet seeing a posting of the September 8, 2025 press release on this on the Committee’s press release page, though it will presumably show up there before long.
The latest release listed there, on September 5, pertains to an investigative report about “Billions in Taxpayer Money Used to Fund Chinese Military Apparatus.” Among the findings of the report is that the Department of Defense or War “does not currently prohibit research relationships on fundamental research with entities DOD has designated as national security threats under the DOD 1260H List—rendering the list functionally meaningless and undermining its own research security framework.”
In order to trick email recipients involved in U.S.-China trade matters into opening email and providing access to their systems, cyber-attackers are impersonating the chairman of the Select Committee, Congressman John Moolenaar (shown above).
The Committee has determined that the activity is “state-backed cyber-espionage aimed at influencing U.S. policy deliberations and negotiation strategies to gain an advantage in trade and foreign policy. Our analysis shows cyber-attackers exploited developer tools to create hidden pathways and then secretly siphoned data straight to their own servers.”
The Committee has given its information about the cyber attacks to the FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police and says that it “will continue to share indicators with federal partners and impacted organizations and will support any necessary defensive or investigative actions.”
Also see:
Select Committee on the CCP: “Fox in the Henhouse: The U.S. Department of Defense Research and Engineering’s Failure to Protect Taxpayer-Funded Defense Research”
“The examples reviewed reveal a pervasive and deeply troubling pattern of U.S. taxpayer-funded research being conducted in collaboration with Chinese entities that are directly tied to China’s defense research and industrial base—many of which appear on various U.S. government entity lists—and state-sponsored talent recruitment programs.”
