The National Time Service Center is of great significance, and it has recently been attacked by the United States. The details are as follows:
Importance of the National Time Service Center
The National Time Service Center is the "heart" of China's time system, undertaking the tasks of generating, maintaining, and disseminating "Beijing Time". "Beijing Time" is China's legal standard time, with an accuracy of up to one second in 60 million years. In the era of informatization, high-precision time-frequency has become an important part of national critical infrastructure, related to the normal operation of the economic society and national security. For example, in the aerospace field, microsecond or even nanosecond-level time errors may lead to major accidents or navigation deviations. The high-precision time service provided by the National Time Service Center has guaranteed the successful launch of many aerospace missions in China. In the financial field, time synchronization is also crucial. Financial businesses such as securities trading and e-banking have extremely high requirements for the accuracy of timestamps. The time service provided by the National Time Service Center provides a technical guarantee for the stable operation of the financial system.
The Incident of the United States Attacking China's National Time Service Center
On October 19, 2025, the national security authorities disclosed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had carried out a major cyber-attack on the National Time Service Center. The attack began in March 2022. The NSA used the SMS service vulnerability of a certain foreign brand of mobile phone to secretly monitor more than 10 staff members of the National Time Service Center, illegally stealing data such as mobile phone address books, text messages, photo albums, and location information. In April 2023, before the "Triangulation" operation was exposed, the NSA used the login credentials stolen from a certain foreign brand of mobile phone to invade the computers of the National Time Service Center in the early morning of Beijing time, spying on the internal network construction situation. From August 2023 to June 2024, the NSA deployed a new type of network combat platform, carried out penetration activities against multiple internal business systems of the National Time Service Center, and attempted to attack major scientific and technological infrastructure such as the high-precision ground-based timing and navigation system. The NSA used 42 types of cyber-attack weapons in this attack, which can be divided into three categories: outpost control weapons, tunnel construction weapons, and data stealing weapons. It built a four-layer encrypted tunnel through the mutual cooperation of these weapons to form a highly hidden and fully functional cyber-attack and espionage platform.
