The groups of hackers, now reported by the Washington Post as working for the Chinese government, compromised computer networks within the Office of Personnel Management, a federal agency that holds personal data of millions of current and former federal employees. This office also hold data from the Anthem health insurance agency.
“They’re definitely going after quite a bit of personnel information,” said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer of ThreatConnect, a Northern Virginia cybersecurity firm. “We suspect they’re using it to understand more about who to target [for espionage], whether electronically or via human recruitment.”The targeting of large-scale databases is a relatively new tactic and is used by the Chinese government to further its intelligence-gathering, the officials and analysts say. It is government espionage, not commercial espionage, they say.
China hacked into the federal government’s network, compromising four million current and former employees’ information. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima talks about what kind of national security risk this poses and why China wants this information. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)
“This is part of their strategic goal — to increase their intelligence collection via big-data theft and big-data aggregation,” said a U.S. government official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s part of a strategic plan.”One hack of OPM, which was disclosed by the government Thursday, dates at least to December, officials said. Earlier last year, OPM discovered a separate intrusion into a highly sensitive database that contains information on employees seeking or renewing security clearances and on their background investigations.
Once harvested, the data can be used to glean details about key government personnel and potential spy recruits, or to gain information useful for counterintelligence. Records in OPM’s database of background investigations, for instance, could contain a complete history of where an individual has lived and all of his or her foreign contacts in, say, China. “So now the Chinese counterintelligence authorities know which American officials are meeting with which Chinese,” a China cyber and intelligence expert said.
The data could help Chinese analysts do more effective targeting of individuals, said a former National Security Agency official. “They can find specific individuals they want to go after, family members,” he said.
The trend has emerged and accelerated over the past 12 to 18 months, the official said. An increase in Chinese capability has opened the way “for bigger data storage, for bigger data theft,” he said. “And when you can gain it in bulk, you take it in bulk.”
