security researchers traced attacks back to employees at China’s leading internet company, Tencent. Often China routed attacks through some of its most popular websites, like 163.com—China’s equivalent of Yahoo—and Sina, the company that runs Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent. 163.com was officially owned and run by a Chinese gaming billionaire, but its mail servers were operated by a Chinese government domain, giving the Communist party’s minders access to all the messages, and digital traffic, routed through it. And the PRC had started using 163.com’s servers as staging grounds for its
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