[2] They are most well known for their alleged responsibility for the high-profile 2015 hack of the United States Office of Personnel Management, stealing the personal details of over 20 million U.S. federal civil servants.

[10] In 2013, Jì Chāoqún (季超群), a Chinese graduate student studying in the United States, was recruited by officials from the JSSD and agreed to "dedicate the rest of his life to [China's] national security."

He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2015 and enlisted as an E-4 in the United States Army Reserve through the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program the following year.

During these meetings, Ji said he could leverage his military credentials to take photos on board the destroyer USS Roosevelt, and that he would seek work in cybersecurity at the CIA, FBI or NASA, in order to gain greater access to databases of classified information.

After the engineer reengaged his Chinese acquaintance at the behest of the FBI, search warrants of the email address the man used revealed him to be Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director of the Sixth Bureau of the JSSD with nearly 20 years experience.

The companies were contractors for the first indigenous Chinese commercial aircraft, the COMAC C919, and the information revealed that China was working to steal the data necessary to cut the vendors out of the supply chain.