Click to see preamble.

    

 
 
Information from our guest, Bruce Moran:
2016 This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations site.

 
 Late on Wednesday, March 23, 2016 the Department of Justice announced that Su Bin, a Chinese national living in Canada, had pleaded guilty to “participating in a years-long conspiracy to hack into the computer networks of major U.S. defense contractors, steal sensitive military and export-controlled data and send the stolen data to China.
 

WHY WHERE CHINESE DIPLOMATS NOT EXPELLED?

 

http://www.newsweek.com/will-us-indict-chinese-hacked-boeing-441018  03/03/2016
 
Over several years, under Su’s direction, two hackers stole some 630,000 files from Boeing related to the C-17 military transport aircraft, as well as data about the F-35 and F-22 fighter jets. The information included detailed drawings; measurements of the wings, fuselage and other parts; outlines of the pipeline and electric wiring systems; and flight test data.
 
 
A U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter jet performs maneuvers during the California International Airshow in Salinas, California, on September 27, 2015. Over several years, under Su Bin’s direction, two hackers stole 630,000 files from Boeing related to the C-17 military transport aircraft, as well as data about the F-35 and F-22 fighter jets. Michael Fiala/Reuters

Su’s conspirators remain unidentified and at large. The 2014 indictment refers to the co-conspirators as “affiliated with multiple organizations and entities.” The plea announcement refers to them as “two persons in China” and says nothing more about them.

But in documents submitted as part of Su’s extradition hearing, the U.S. government identified them as People’s Liberation Army (PLA) hackers. The documents included intercepted emails with digital images attached that showed military IDs with name, rank, military unit and date of birth.

Still unknown is whether Su and the hackers operated on their own or were directed by Chinese government officials. Were they motivated by profit, patriotism or some combination of the two?

Much of the correspondence makes the hackers sound like PLA freelancers. Marketing themselves, they tell Su they were involved in previous attacks on defense industries as well as Tibetan and pro-democracy activists—targets with no commercial value but of interest to the government.
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Why the US Hasn’t Pinned the OPM Hack on China.
 

 

By Robert Knake Senior Fellow for Cyber Policy, 

Council on Foreign Relations Read bios
June 18, 2015
 
Getting China to stop this activity is at the top of Washington's diplomatic agenda. Stopping foreign intelligence services from spying, however, is not.

The theft of data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) 06/15/15 (100,000 plus - with national security clearances) has made great fodder for two weeks of cable news. Banner headlines have declared it an act of cyber warfare carried out by the Chinese government. Yet, while Twitter has been abuzz, official statements attributing the attack have yet to materialize.

There are two likely explanations for why the White House has not pinned the incident on China. The first possibility is that the evidence is not there yet. Given time, attribution may get to the point at which a public accusation would be warranted. A more intriguing option is that the administration hasn’t called China out because, under emerging norms for espionage in cyberspace, information on Federal employees is considered a legitimate target.

Assuming the Chinese government was behind the incident, its cyber spies were doing exactly what they were trained to do. They were also doing exactly what we should expect them to do, and what we should be prepared to counter. As General Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and the CIA in the Bush Administration put it, “This isn’t shame on China. This is shame on us.”

When the Obama Administration has come out and publicly accused another country for a cyber attack, it hasn’t been for this kind of state-on-state spying. What the Obama Administration has strongly objected to is China’s campaign of economic espionage against American companies. In May of 2014, the Justice Department went as far as to hand down indictments for five Chinese military hackers, accusing them of carrying out a multi-year campaign to steal industrial secrets from U.S. companies for the purpose of sharing that information with Chinese companies.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has stated in clear terms that the United States intelligence community does not engage in this kind of spying. To do so would undermine the global marketplace by providing an unfair advantage to state-owned enterprises (of which the United States has none).

Getting China to stop this activity is at the top of our diplomatic agenda. Stopping foreign intelligence services from spying is not. If the Obama Administration had taken the advice of former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and kicked the Chinese Ambassador out of the country in response to the OPM attack, we would be setting a standard to which we would not wish to be held.


WIKIpedia: In June 2015, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that it had been the target of a data breach targeting the records of as many as four million people.[1] Later, FBI Director James Comey put the number at 18 million.[2] The data breach, which had started in March 2014, and may have started earlier, was noticed by the OPM in April 2015.[1][3] It has been described by federal officials as among the largest breaches of government data in the history of the United States.[1] Information targeted in the breach included personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers,[4] as well as names, dates and places of birth, and addresses.[5] The hack went deeper than initially believed and likely involved theft of detailed security-clearance-related background information. One victim wrote that the OPM is the agency that asks your neighbors what they know about you that could be used to blackmail you.[6][7][8]
 
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6/20/2016
08:00 PM

Kelly Jackson Higgins

China Still Successfully Hacking US, But Less

(BJM Because they have already infiltrated (breached) the system? Cannot find out how they are in the system....)

 
      
New FireEye report shows significant decline in the number of Chinese cyber espionage attacks on the US since 2014, but China has definitely not stopped the intellectual property theft.

Successful cyberattacks by China hacker groups targeting corporate networks in the US and other regions have dramatically decreased since mid-2014, a new report finds. Even so, China continues to wage attacks in order to steal intellectual property despite political pressure by the US government -- and China's cyber espionage campaigns appear to be more streamlined.

So in case you were wondering whether the historic “no-hack” pact in September 2015 between President Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping -- where the two leaders promised not to wage cyberattacks for economic gain -- has made a difference, the answer is both yes and no. While no one expected major change in the wake of the pact, there have been some noticeable shifts in the volume of attacks by China in the past couple of years, according to new findings from FireEye. The pact is one of several factors, including earlier political and economic forces that were already under way beforehand, according to FireEye.

FireEye concluded that since 2013 when it first exposed China’s infamous APT1 cyber espionage operation led by the PLA, China’s hacking is “less voluminous but more focused, calculated, and still successful in compromising” companies’ networks. Of a total of 262 compromises, FireEye found that China had executed more than 70 successful attacks in April 2014; 40 in July 2015; and fewer than five in May 2016.

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Jordan Berry, principal threat analyst with FireEye, says the findings show some changes in the way China’s hacking machine operates, but the groups are still very much active and targeting companies’ intellectual property and personally identifiable information. “We observed an overall cyber activity decline in mid-2014 [by China], although they did not cease operations and they continue … albeit in lower volume,” Berry says. “A confluence of events” drove the decline in attacks, he says.

FireEye studied the number of network compromises by suspected China-based hackers starting in early 2013 through June 2016, drawing from its Mandiant incident response cases, and FireEye’s cloud-based network monitoring as well as its threat intelligence data. They found 262 successful network attacks by 72 different suspected China-based groups: of those attacks, 182 hit US companies.

From September 2015 until this month, FireEye says just 13 suspected China-based hacking teams broke into corporate networks in the US, Europe, and Japan, as well as commercial, government, and military organizations in nations near China, including Russia. “However, since mid-2014, we have observed an overall decrease in successful network compromises by China-based groups against organizations in the U.S. and 25 other countries. These shifts have coincided with ongoing political and military reforms in China, widespread exposure of Chinese cyber activity, and unprecedented action by the U.S. government,” FireEye’s report says.

Among the factors likely behind the decline in the number of cyberattacks on the US, according to FireEye: Xi’s military reforms as well as centralization of China’s cyber operations since he first took office in 2012; research exposing Chinese cyber espionage activity; and intensified US pressure on China, including the US indictment of five members of the Chinese military for allegedly hacking and stealing trade secrets of major American steel, solar energy, and other manufacturing companies, including Alcoa, Westinghouse Electric, and US Steel.
 
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“Although many in the U.S. initially doubted that these actions would have any effect, they may have prompted Beijing to reconsider the execution of its network operations,” according to FireEye's report.

Other security research firms have seen some shifts in China’s intellectual theft hacking over the past year as well. Costin Raiu, director of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Lab, in an interview in February said his firm’s researchers witnessed a dramatic drop in Chinese-speaking APTs going after US and UK organizations’ intellectual property in the wake of the Obama-Xi pact. But Kaspersky Lab also witnessed at 300% increase in attacks on Russian targets by Chinese groups in a period of two months.

“Immediately after the signing of the agreement, there was silence” in attacks against the US, Raiu said. “Then there were some small bits and pieces of random noise … but after that, they [Chinese-speaking APTs] completely went silent in the US and UK,” Raiu said, referring to Xi’s similar no-hack deal in October with Prime Minister Cameron in the UK.

 

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