Chinese Cyber Attackers Are Back

It was clear that the Chinese hackers went quiet after the United States made a huge noise about their operations, but now they seem to be back in action again.



Earlier in 2013, the United States moaned about some secretive Chinese military unit which believed to be behind a series of hacking attacks. Shanghai-based Unit 61398 was accused of a large number of US attacks – this is despite the fact that the country’s Defense Ministry denied the claims. Anyway, the attacks ended.



However, it now seems that with the United States being outted as the place with a serious cyber spying problem, the Chinese hackers are back. According to the American-Chinese Economic and Security Commission, a panel whose task is to advise the US Congress on China policy, explained that Mandiant’s revelations brought a brief pause in cyber intrusions by that PLA unit. The outfit claimed in a draft of its annual report to Congress that they had no signs of the public exposure of the local cyber espionage in technical detail throughout 2013. Apparently, this has led the country to change its attitude toward the use of cyber espionage to steal economic and trade data.

Media reports reveal that Mandiant’s revelations just forced Unit 61398 to make changes to its cyber instruments and infrastructure in order to make their future intrusions harder to detect and attribute.

In the meantime, the Chinese embassy in Washington claimed that the hacker attacks were transnational and anonymous, so nobody knows how the evidence against China can be gathered. The industry experts suggest that the unit simply re-activated with new instruments and methods after it was revealed by Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency had conducted cyber-operations against targets in both China and Hong Kong.