Mandiant Report Names Chinese Military in Hacking Attacks

A report released on Monday by Mandiant Corp., a well-respected US cyber-security firm, identified the People’s Liberation Army’s Shanghai-based Unit 61398 as the likely culprit of a series of hacking attacks on a wide variety of industries in the US and Canada. SNS Member Joseph Menn covered Mandiant’s unprecedented report in the article “Security group suspects Chinese military is behind hacking attempts”:

www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-china-hacking-idUSBRE91I06120130219

According to Menn’s article, “the unit had stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations across a diverse set of industries beginning as early as 2006.”

SNS members have been hearing this message for many years now. SNS CEO Mark Anderson writes in the most recent SNS Global Report (SNS: International Challenges to Innovation Protection, 2/20/2013),

“I expect that the effects of Mandiant’s work and announcement will be pivotal in bringing CEOs to a new level of acceptance that their country, and their companies, are under constant and direct attack by military-grade teams. The goals of these state-sponsored teams is to obtain corporate Intellectual Property and sell it at subsidized prices in global markets in direct competition with the inventing companies and nations.”

We hope that the recent Mandiant announcements, and important coverage of this issue by experts such as Joseph Menn, will lead corporations to take real and immediate steps to end the immense threat of crown-jewel IP theft.