Published in News

Chinese hackers crank up activity again

by on20 May 2013

China’s People’s Liberation Army has been busy

Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China’s People’s Liberation Army went silent they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques.

The Obama administration had bet that “naming and shaming” the groups, first in industry reports and then in the Pentagon’s own detailed survey of Chinese military capabilities, might prompt China’s new leadership to crack down on the military’s team of hackers. But it appears that Unit 6139 is back in business, according to American officials and security companies. 

Mandiant, a private security company that helps companies and government agencies defend themselves from hackers, said the attacks had resumed but would not identify the targets. The victims were many of the same ones the unit had attacked before. Mandiant said that the Chinese hackers had stopped their attacks after they were exposed in February and removed their spying tools from the organisations they had infiltrated.

But in the last two months, they have begun attacking the same victims from new servers and have reinserted many of the tools that enable them to seek out data without detection. The subject of Chinese attacks is expected to be a central issue in an upcoming visit to China by President Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon. However little is expected to come of it, the Chinese have always denied that they have a hacked anyone, ever.

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