For a while now I believe that attribution of hacker attacks has been rapidly improving. Well now we have confirmation from a Ken Dilanian scoop in the LA Times. Dilanian reports that “the U.S. intelligence community is nearing completion of its first detailed review of cyber-spying against American targets from abroad, including an attempt to calculate U.S. financial losses from hacker attacks based in China.” And the intelligence estimate shows just how far the US has come in identifying the source of particular intrusions:
Intelligence analysts disagree over the extent to which the intrusions are organized by Chinese authorities, but the CIA and National Security Agency have traced cyber-attacks and thefts to Chinese military and intelligence agencies….
“We know much more about who is doing this than we did even two years ago,” one official involved in the effort said. “We have traced attacks back to a desk in a [People’s Liberation Army] office building.”
Nice work, intell community.