China blamed for cyber assaults in new ‘Cold War’
AHUGE breach of US federal computer networks disclosed this week is the latest in a flood of attacks by suspected Chinese hackers aimed at grabbing personal data, industrial secrets and weapons plans from government and private computers.
The Obama administration on Thursday disclosed the breach of computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management and said the records of up to 4-million current and former federal employees may have been compromised.
US officials have said on condition of anonymity they believe the hackers are based in China, but Washington has not publicly blamed Beijing. China has denied involvement. It was the second hacking in less than a year at the personnel office. The first has been linked to earlier thefts of personal data from millions of records at Anthem, the US health insurer, and Premera Blue Cross, a healthcare services provider also blamed on Chinese hackers.
Guidance Software, a cybersecurity firm, said the first signs of data “exfiltration” were detected with Einstein, an intrusion detection system. That activity, it said, was traced back to a machine under the control of Chinese intelligence.
“It’s a different form of Cold War at this point,” said Rob Eggebrecht, co-founder and CEO of Denver-based InteliSecure, a private cybersecurity firm which had seen a spike in attacks on private company networks by Chinese operators over the past three months.
“We’ve seen a huge uptick in opportunistic exfil- tration of high-value data,” he said.
Admiral James Winnefeld, vice-chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, told a cyber conference at West Point academy last month that US adversaries such as China and Russia were rapidly increasing their assaults on military networks.
“We’re haemorrhaging information at a dizzying rate, evidenced by the uncanny similarity of some of our potential adversaries’ new platforms to those we’ve been developing,” said Adm Winnefeld.