China Hackers Exposed

Security experts in the United States claim that a 12-story office building outside of Shanghai is the headquarters of a sophisticated hacking unit within the Chinese military established to attack computer networks in America and elsewhere.

According to a report published Tuesday morning by a Northern Virginia-based information security company, an elusive squadron of Chinese cyberwarriors operating under the name Unit 61398 has engaged in countless battles with governments and entities around the globe for years under the umbrella of the People’s Liberation Army.

The group is accused of infiltrating the computers of some of the biggest businesses and agencies in the US, both public and private alike, and is assumed to still be at large.

Alexandria, Virginia’s Mandiant says they’ve been investigating PLA Unit 61398 for years now and has watched them compromise 141 companies across 20 major industries, infecting the computers at places like Coca-Cola and the Canadian arm of Telvent with malicious codes used to pilfer servers for privileged information and wreak havoc. In their report, the security experts say that they are all but certain that those attacks have originated out of an inconspicuous white office building on the outskirts of Shanghai that has been provided with a special fiber optic communications infrastructure from Chinese telecom providers in the name of national defense — but China maintains the claim that they have not engaged in any illegal hacks.

Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia begs to differ, and tells The New York Times that either those attacks are being waged by Unit 61398 out of the building in question, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

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“It’s where more than 90 percent of the attacks we followed come from,” says Mr. Mandia, who adds that the unit is "chartered with hiring people that can speak English, and be able to exploit networks, and know computer security.”

“We thought that was an interesting combination, and that unit just so happens to be located in the same region of Shanghai where we're tracking over 90 percent of the connections coming from,” he tells the Times. Additionally, his company discovered that two sets of I.P. addresses used in the attacks being studied were registered in the same neighborhood as the building assumed to be used by Unit 61398.

“The totality of the evidence” leads to the company to conclude that the building described by the Times to be in a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of Shanghai is the originating point of the attacks.

Details of an advanced cyberwar against the US by way of China has been hinted at by members of the Obama administration since the president began his first term in office in 2009, although publically little information about the actual threat posed by Far East hackers has been officially divulged. Through documents obtained by the website WikiLeaks, however, information has emerged that only begins to discuss the intensity of the threat. US State Department diplomatic cables released in 2010 by WikiLeaks and attributed to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning discus sophisticated cyberattacks against the US waged by a Chinese unit given the codename “Byzantine Candor,” or BC. The Times reports that that moniker for Unit 61398 — formally, the Second Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Staff Department’s Third Department — was dropped by American officials following the highly publicized disclosure of the hundreds of thousands of sensitive State Department documents.

In one cable from November 2008, a State Department official writes, “hackers based in Shanghai and linked to the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Third Department have been using these compromised systems as part of the larger BC attack infrastructure to facilitate computer network exploitation (CNE) of U.S. and foreign information systems.”

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“A October 23 DoD cable states Shanghai-based hackers associated with BC activity and linked to the PLA have successfully targeted multiple U.S. entities,” the memo continues. “In the US, the majority of the systems BC actors have targeted belong to the U.S. Army, but targets also include other DoD services as well as DoS, Department of Energy, additional USG entities and commercial systems and networks.”

But despite the State Department cables spawning an insurmountable number of media articles and remarks, the publishing of the Mandiant report presents an American audience for the first time with detailed claims about intrusions and attacks waged against countries around the globe with undoubtedly damaging repercussions. It also comes on the heels of a renewed call for federal cybersecurity legislation in the United States, which could now be sooner than ever thanks to the latest revelations regarding Unit 61398.

found here.............. http://rt.com/usa/news/cyber-china-war-unit-604/