Su Bin, a 49-year-old Chinese national also known as "Stephen Su," was named in a five-count federal indictment returned in Los Angeles on August 14, 2014 charging him with conspiring with two unindicted co-conspirators based in China — widely reported as PLA officers — to infiltrate U.S. defense-contractor networks and steal sensitive military-aircraft design data. The scheme ran from October 2008 through March 2014 and targeted Boeing and other contractors to obtain confidential information about the C-17 military transport, the F-22 fighter, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, with prosecutors describing the theft of hundreds of thousands of files. The indictment charged unauthorized computer access, conspiracy to illegally export defense articles, and conspiracy to steal trade secrets, carrying a maximum statutory penalty of 30 years; Su was held in British Columbia on a U.S. provisional arrest warrant and was investigated by the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He pleaded guilty on March 23, 2016 and was sentenced on July 13, 2016 to 46 months in prison, a $10,000 fine, and one year of supervised release. The case has since been cited as a primary documented source of design-data parallels visible in China's Shenyang J-31/J-35 stealth fighter program, and remains a benchmark example of state-directed economic and military cyber-espionage against the U.S. defense industrial base.

Sources

• -https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/losangeles/news/press-releases/los-angeles-grand-jury-indicts-chinese-national-in-computer-hacking-scheme-allegedly-involving-theft-of-trade-secrets