China’s Army Tied to Hacking Against US

China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S. - NYTimes.com: " . . . An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area. “Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence Estimate, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content. . . . "

Chinese Army Hackers Are Trying to Bring Down U.S. Infrastructure, After All - Global - The Atlantic Wire: " . . . The level of detail in Mandiant's 60-page report is intimidating if you're an interested citizen — it must be horrifying for the hackers implicated in the operation who may or may not have just gotten busted (by way of Facebook and Twitter, no less). Mandiant knows not only the location of P.L.A. Unit 61398's headquarters but also the various levels of hacking expertise on staff, its spot in the hierarchy of the Army, and the companies it's targeted in recent years. The unit's more commonly known as the "Comment Crew" or the "Shanghai Group." It even made an appearance in a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks in 2010 that detailed the group's activity. It was later revealed that the government called the unit "Byzantine Candor," and it's not unimaginable that Obama was referring to Unit 61398's capabilities in his WSJ column as well as his State of the Union Address, when he warned of "enemies … seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air-traffic control systems. . . ."


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