BA Boeing Co

Chinese hacking of corporate and government networks in the U.S. and other countries appears to be declining, according to computer-security experts at companies hired to investigate these breaches.

The drop-off is stark and may date back two years. Hackers operating out of China were linked to between 50 and 70 incidents that the cybersecurity company FireEye Inc. was investigating on a monthly basis in 2013 and the early part of 2014, said Laura Galante, the company's director of global intelligence. Starting in October 2015, however, this tally dropped below 10 incidents and hasn't recovered, she said.

"We saw this decline start in 2014 and then another dip in 2015," she said.

FireEye rival CrowdStrike Inc. says that it, too, has noticed a drop in China-based hacking incidents. Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch said the decline occurred this year and may be caused by a sweeping reorganization of China's military, announced earlier this year.

"I would not necessarily assume that this is a long-term trend," he said.

FireEye thinks the decline started earlier and resulted from multiple factors, including public scrutiny and pressure from the U.S. government.

The U.S. government has long accused Chinese hackers of widespread espionage into both corporate and government networks. In 2013, security researchers at Mandiant, later acquired by FireEye, published a report detailing a widespread computer-espionage campaign, called "APT1," that the company linked to the Chinese military.

The U.S. government ramped up the pressure in 2014, when it indicted five Chinese military officers on charges of hacking into U.S. companies to steal trade secrets. None of those charged has appeared in the U.S.

In March, Su Bin, a Chinese aviation executive, pleaded guilty to cyberespionage charges for attempting to steal data on Boeing Co.'s C-17 Globemaster III aircraft.

Ahead of a visit to the U.S. by Chinese President Xi Jinping in September 2015, news leaked that President Barack Obama was considering sanctions against Chinese companies that benefited from hacking. China's top security czar flew to Washington to hammer out an agreement, later announced by the two presidents, that China would stop supporting cyberespionage for commercial purposes.

The White House continues to make "slow and steady" progress with China on cyberissues but has no assessment on whether China's behavior has declined, a senior administration official said Monday. "Certainly there is a much greater Chinese awareness that this is an issue that they have to deal with in the bilateral relationship," he said.

A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington said the two countries are working together to combat cybercrime. "China firmly opposes and is committed to combating all forms of cybercrimes," the spokesman said.

In a report set to be released Monday, FireEye cautioned that hacking linked to China hasn't been eliminated. FireEye has linked 72 hacking groups to China over the past 3½ years. Since September 2015, 13 of them have been active, hacking into corporations in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Japan and other countries.

"We're still seeing compromises of corporate networks, though in far smaller number than we were seeing in 2015," Ms. Galante said.

One human-rights group said it has seen no change in attacks on Tibetan or rights activists critical of the Chinese government. "We haven't noticed any drop in what we're looking at," said Ronald Deibert, director of The Citizen Lab, a research institution at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs that helps groups fend off computer attacks that are typically linked back to China.

Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 20, 2016 20:25 ET (00:25 GMT)

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