A unit of Taiwan’s Investigation Bureau has charged two executives of a company that allegedly helped China’s cyber spies target Taiwanese officials and scholars, impersonating reporters affiliated with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

After searching the offices of local firm Abigail and other locations, the Taipei City Investigation Office issued deferred prosecution orders against Li Hualun and Chen Mengsen for violating the personal data protection act and other crimes, according to a statementreleased by the bureau today.

The two obtained accounts for the messaging app LINE and leased them to Xiamen Empress Information Technology Co. Ltd.,

a firm allegedly linked to China’s cyber army, for about $161 per account. This enabled Chinese government-backed hackers to launch “social engineering attacks” against Taiwanese officials, as well as scholars and NGO workers, by impersonating journalists, the investigators found. 

The suspects “acted under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party’s cyber army unit,” the bureau said. 

The Taiwanese authorities’ operation follows an investigationby ICIJ and cybersecurity analysts at Toronto University’s Citizen Lab, which investigates digital threats against civil society. It identified suspicious emails by ICIJ impersonators and phony Chinese whistleblowers sent to ICIJ reporters as part of a sophisticated offensive strategy aimed at stealing private information from entities of interest to the Chinese government. The targets included Uyghur, Tibetan, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong diaspora activists, as well as journalists from ICIJ and elsewhere who report on activities related to these groups.

The attacks against the ICIJ network followed the 2025 publication of China Targets, which exposed Beijing’s tactics to silence dissidents overseas. 

Citizen Lab found several errors in the suspicious emails, suggesting that the attackers may have been involved in a “high volume” of attacks and used artificial intelligence to automate them, identify targets and generate messages without much oversight.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/fake-journalists-cyber-spies-china-targets-reporters/

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A U.S. senator is pressing pharmaceutical giant Merck over its patenting and pricing practices for the blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, escalating congressional scrutiny of industry strategies that can delay lower-cost rivals from reaching the market.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), ranking member of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care, said that Merck and other drug companies often file excessive patents to extend their monopolies and keep more affordable versions of their pricey drugs out of reach. In a letter to Merck CEO Robert Davis, the lawmaker asked the company to detail patent actions connected to both the Keytruda intravenous version, which has been on the market for over a decade, and its new injectable version of the drug, which launched last year.

“I continue to have serious concerns about how Merck’s anti-competitive practices have boosted profits at the expense of patients,” Hassan wrote in her letter, sent this week. She added she has noted in previous years how “these kinds of patent gimmicks have allowed Merck to delay other companies from selling lower cost versions of this medication, all while raising the price of Keytruda in the U.S. year after year.”

Hassan cited a finding from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent Cancer Calculus investigation, which showed that Merck’s new injectable version of Keytruda “could help Merck generate billions of dollars and delay competition into the 2030s.”

https://www.icij.org/investigations/cancer-calculus/merck-keytruda-cancer-drug-price/

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https://www.icij.org/investigations/cancer-calculus/lowering-doses-of-cancer-drugs-could-slash-global-health-spending-by-30b-new-research-shows/

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https://www.icij.org/investigations/cancer-calculus/keytruda-evergreening-patents-merck/

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