Speaker: Aleksandar Milenkoski 

Since its inception, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained ties with criminal organisations, leveraging them for activities such as assassinations and smuggling. Today, this legacy persists in the cyber domain. State-aligned Chinese cyber actors affiliate with cybercriminal groups and use tactics typically associated with them, including ransomware, a destructive malware typically linked to cybercrime.

This discussion-based seminar will explore the CCP’s historical relationship with criminal elements and examine how that relationship has evolved in the modern era. It will broaden the conversation beyond ransomware to consider currently relevant strategic objectives associated with its use by Chinese threat actors, including personal enrichment, which is likely overlooked or tolerated by the state and driven by socio-economic factors, strategic disruption, and plausible deniability.

Continuing the discussion of plausible deniability, the seminar will also invite dialogue on China’s growing efforts to portray itself as a responsible actor in the cyber domain and shape the public narrative around cyber conflict, particularly through the disclosure of alleged cyberespionage operations by Western-aligned entities.

About the speaker

Aleksandar Milenkoski is a Senior Threat Researcher at SentinelLabs. With expertise in malware research and focus on targeted attacks, he brings a blend of practical and deep insights to the forefront of cyber threat intelligence.

Aleksandar has a PhD in system security and is the author of numerous reports on cyberespionage and high-impact cybercriminal operations, conference talks, and peer-reviewed research papers. From 2011 to 2014, he was a European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow. His research has won awards from SPEC, the Bavarian Foundation for Science, and the University of Würzburg.