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China on Saturday said it has deported a foreign national for allegedly collecting and illegally transferring protected plant species abroad nearly 2,000 times, warning that external forces had infringed the country’s ecological security.

The foreigner has “illegally excavated and collected” China’s key protected plant species, China’s Ministry of State Security said in a statement.

“The foreigner was instructed by an overseas organisation to illegally dig up and collect specimens and seed samples of thousands of wild plant species, and transported them abroad through illegal channels nearly 2,000 times,” the ministry said.

It did not disclose the name or nationality of the foreigner nor identified the plants taken, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

The foreigner travelled to “dozens of reserves and scenic areas” in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces from 2011 in an operation that lasted nine years.

It also did not specify which law the foreigner broke but cited the country’s counter-espionage law, saying that “stealing, spying on, purchasing, and illegally providing” the “foregoing documents, data, materials, or items”, were all acts of espionage.

“The state security agency has expelled him/her in accordance with the law, successfully cutting off the ‘black hand’ of foreign forces that infringed on China’s ecological security,” the Ministry said.

In another statement, the Ministry also warned that in recent years, China’s national security agencies have discovered that foreign cyber spies have continuously attacked the information systems of key departments and enterprises within China.

This resulted in the theft of important sensitive data and posed a threat to China’s data security and cybersecurity.

Cyberspace has become an important battlefield for foreign intelligence agencies conducting espionage activities against China, and the situation is becoming increasingly severe, state-run Global Times quoted the Ministry as saying.

China which faced global criticism for recurring hacker attacks said in recent years, foreign cyber spies have continuously attacked the information systems of key institutions, departments, and enterprises within China, taking advantage of the inadequate security measures, negligence, and convenience-seeking behaviour of these institutions to establish covert transmission channels and continuously steal important sensitive data.

It said foreign cyber spies used open-source intelligence information from a man surnamed Li, who worked for an email system manufacturer stole the client account passwords collected by him.

They then used this as a springboard to carry out espionage on the email systems of thousands of key institutions, it said.

As Li possessed administrator-level account passwords, the foreign cyber spies obtained a large amount of internal email data from key institutions, causing serious harm, it added.

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