FBI: Chinese Hacking Group Has Had Access to US Government Files for Years

“How many times can this keep happening before we finally realize we’re screwed?” said Michael Adams, an information security expert who served in the US Special Operations Command

FBI: Chinese Hacking Group Has Had Access to US Government Files for Years

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According to motherboard.vice.com, the FBI warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011.

The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for more than a year infiltrated the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. In the process, they stole highly sensitive data about several millions of government workers and even spies.

Domains controlled by the hackers were “suspended” as of late December 2015, according to the alert, but it’s unclear if the hackers have been pushed out or they are still inside the hacked networks.

“Looks like they were in for years before they were caught, god knows where they are,” Michael Adams, an information security expert who served more than two decades in the US Special Operations Command, and who has reviewed the alert, told Motherboard. “Anybody who’s been in that network all this long, they could be anywhere and everywhere.”

For Adams, this alert shows that the US government still is not in control of what’s going on inside its most sensitive networks. This alert, he said, is an admission of that. “It’s just flabbergasting,” he said. “How many times can this keep happening before we finally realize we’re screwed?”

A report on the APT6 group activity can be found on the zscaler website.

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