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Monday, June 22, 2015

US Employee Data Hack Tied to Chinese Intelligence: Sources

The Chinese hacking group suspected of stealing sensitive information about millions of current and former U.S. government employees has a different mission and organizational structure than the military hackers who have been accused of other U.S. data breaches, according to people familiar with the matter.

While the Chinese People's Liberation Army typically goes after defense and trade secrets, this hacking group has repeatedly accessed data that could be useful to Chinese counter-intelligence and internal stability, said two people close to the U.S. investigation.

Washington has not publicly accused Beijing of orchestrating the data breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and China has dismissed as "irresponsible and unscientific" any suggestion that it was behind the attack.

Sources told Reuters that the hackers employed a rare tool to take remote control of computers, dubbed Sakula, that was also used in the data breach at U.S. health insurer Anthem Inc disclosed this year.

The Anthem attack, in turn, has been tied to a group that security researchers said is affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security, which is focused on government stability, counter-intelligence and dissidents. The ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Routing.It began right here.Everything starts here because we are a bunch of malicious people working hard every day to incriminate other countries.Is it any wonder why we are so hated?Even if 99.9% of our population have no intention to falsely implicate other countries in OUR wrongdoing we are all hated equally.We just accept being told what China and other countries are doing to us because we could not challenge those accusations if we wanted to.When that one tenth of one percent of our population is responsible for the chaos their secret is safe by their numbers,because only a select few Americans are involved and/or have a clue.

Anonymous said...

An act of war?
I'd say so. We should at least be in their face about it, not inviting them to luxurious state dinners.

Anonymous said...

10:39 It's absolutely an act of war, they now have information on our secret intelligence assets, many of our people are going to die or at least be in constant danger. Before hacking many of our operatives died trying to secretly get the same kind of information from our enemies working in the field. Any US government official that still panders to the Chinese communists after this blatant act of war is a traitor. We all know who that will be.