A former Pentagon official says there is no clear proof showing that hackers, who targeted a US government agency, were necessarily from China, adding that they could be from within the United States.
Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst at the US Department of Defense, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Friday
On Thursday, US officials claimed that hackers from China had broken into the computer system of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in December, possibly compromising the personal data of at least 4 million current and former federal employees.
“The United States similarly does cyber hacking in other countries,” Maloof said.
The OPM, which conducts background checks for security clearances, declined to comment on who was behind the hack.
However, some US officials, who spoke on conditions of anonymity, claimed that hackers from China are behind the attack, according to the Washington Post.
On Friday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry slammed the US for making unfounded accusations, saying that China is itself the target of hacking attacks.
Maloof said that “the charges are very, very serious. What it does reflect though is absolute requirements for the United States to take more seriously cyber security.”
“The Chinese rejection is expected. They are not going to admit it that they are doing it,” he said.
“This is where it gets a little murky, because it could be an entity that is not necessarily responsible directly to the Chinese government, or it could even be the Chinese military, because it has been revealed that there are entities within China’s military whose job is to hack into data bases and acquire information, particularly for economic espionage, and also for military espionage,” he added.
“But… it could also be the Russians, it could even be [people from] within the United States itself,” he noted.
“There’s no definite proof that they were Chinese or Russians or even North Koreans. But it certainly could also have been someone within the United States, although US authorities are suggesting that it came out of China,” the analyst concluded.
Washington has for years accused the Chinese government and military of conducting computer-based attacks against the US, including efforts to steal information from federal agencies.
It claims that the Chinese military has made cyber warfare capabilities a priority over a decade ago and often blames people linked to it for hacking into US companies’ computers to steal secrets.
Beijing says Washington’s cyber attack accusations are hypocritical, since intelligence leaks have revealed that the US itself is most active perpetrator of cyber espionage against foreign countries, especially against China.
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