Is China building the “Facebook of human intelligence capabilities?” Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence for cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, thinks so, according to a Bloomberg report.
“This appears to be a real maturity in the way they are using cyber to enable broader intelligence goals,” Meyers said.
The report lays out a series of cyberattacks carried out over a period of more than two years — American travel companies, health insurance companies and federal agencies, culminating (so far) in the breaches of Office of Personnel Management records that compromised data on more than 21 million people.
Special Report: The OPM Data Breach: What You Need to Know
The attacks have been treated as discrete incidents, but some security experts believe that they are part of a coordinated campaign to collect information on people that has gone unrecognized by America’s intelligence agencies. By mid-2014, according to the report, it was clear that the hackers were stockpiling health records and personal information on Americans.
“There was a clear and apparent shift,” said Jordan Berry, an analyst at FireEye, quoted in the article.
U.S. policy has put the emphasis on protecting critical infrastructure, but the kind of information that the hackers have been collecting could be used to penetrate American networks even deeper, said Rep. Michael McCaul, R.-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
China denies that it is involved in cyber espionage against the U.S.
