Editor’s Note: In May 2011, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Pentagon: Cyber Attacks Can Count as Acts of War.” The article began, “The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.”
A U.S. cyber-security firm has released evidence that the largest organized data mining effort around the world was not random hackers as first suspected but rather an organized branch of the Chinese military.
The unit, called “Unit 61398”, has stolen “hundreds of terabytes of data” from at least 141 organizations around the world since 2004.
The Chinese immediately denounced the report saying that hacking is “transnational and anonymous” while determining origins is “extremely difficult.” They accused the U.S. firm, Mandiant, of being irresponsible, unprofessional and unhelpful.
Mandiant’s report lays out substantial evidence of the military’s compliance to the point of determining the location of the unit behind the hacking. Despite the government’s insistence that no unit exists, a BBC news crew taping the unit’s headquarters in Shanghai was detained by troops until they agreed to turn over their footage.
“From our observations, it is one of the most prolific cyber espionage groups in terms of the sheer quantity of information stolen,” Mandant said, adding that it was “likely government-sponsored and one of the most persistent of China’s cyber threat actors”.
The most hacked organizations by the Unit were information technology, aerospace and public administration groups.
