A man accused of conducting cyberattacks on behalf of the Chinese government has been extradited to the United States and is now in federal custody in Houston, Texas. Xu Zewei appeared in federal court for an initial hearing on Monday and was remanded back into custody.
The U.S. Justice Department had previously charged Xu with working as a contractor for China’s Ministry of State Security through a Shanghai-based company called Shanghai Powerock Network, which prosecutors say conducted hacking operations for Beijing. Xu and his alleged co-conspirator Zhang Yu reportedly reported their activities directly to Chinese state officials in Shanghai.
Prosecutors allege that in early 2020, Xu and Zhang targeted several U.S. universities to steal research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in March 2021, the two also allegedly participated in an “indiscriminate” campaign to hack thousands of Microsoft Exchange email servers. That operation has been attributed to a Chinese-backed hacking group known as Hafnium — later called Silk Typhoon. According to prosecutors, Hafnium targeted more than 60,000 entities in the U.S. and successfully compromised more than 12,700 of them, including defense contractors, law firms, think tanks, and infectious disease researchers.
Xu was arrested in Italy at the request of U.S. authorities before being extradited on Saturday, April 26, 2026, according to his Italian lawyer, Simona Candido. If convicted, he faces over a decade in prison.
China’s Foreign Ministry opposed the extradition and accused the U.S. government of “fabricating cases,” according to the Financial Times. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
The case follows a broader pattern of U.S. charges against suspected Chinese hackers, many of whom remain at large. In 2022, Chinese government intelligence officer Yanjun Xu — a separate individual — was sentenced to 20 years in prison in what the DOJ described as the first such extradition of a Chinese state intelligence officer to the United States.
Source: TechCrunch