- Aug 17, 2017
- 1,504
New York Times’ reporter David Sanger’s new book contains an explosive claim. In The Perfect Weapon, Sanger alleges that staff from American cybersecurity firm Mandiant, a private company, broke into the laptops of individual, Chinese military hackers. This campaign was apparently part of Mandiant’s exposure of the Chinese hacking group dubbed APT1, which had targeted a slew of American companies for years.
Now FireEye, which has since acquired Mandiant, has vehemently denied the claims, saying Sanger did not accurately report how the company identified the Chinese hackers.
"Mr. Sanger's description of how Mandiant obtained some of the evidence underlying APT1 has resulted in a serious mischaracterization of our investigative efforts," the company said in a blog post published Monday.
"To state this unequivocally, Mandiant did not employ 'hack back' techniques as part of investigation of APT1, does not 'hack back' in our incident response practice, and does not endorse the practice of 'hacking back'," the blog post adds.
“As soon as they detected Chinese hackers breaking into the private networks of some of their clients—mostly Fortune 500 companies—Mandia’s [Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant] investigators reached back through the network to activate the cameras on the hackers’ own laptops,” Sanger’s book reads. “They could see their keystrokes while actually watching them at their desks.”
Read more: American Cyber Security Firm FireEye Denies Hacking Chinese Military
Now FireEye, which has since acquired Mandiant, has vehemently denied the claims, saying Sanger did not accurately report how the company identified the Chinese hackers.
"Mr. Sanger's description of how Mandiant obtained some of the evidence underlying APT1 has resulted in a serious mischaracterization of our investigative efforts," the company said in a blog post published Monday.
"To state this unequivocally, Mandiant did not employ 'hack back' techniques as part of investigation of APT1, does not 'hack back' in our incident response practice, and does not endorse the practice of 'hacking back'," the blog post adds.
“As soon as they detected Chinese hackers breaking into the private networks of some of their clients—mostly Fortune 500 companies—Mandia’s [Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant] investigators reached back through the network to activate the cameras on the hackers’ own laptops,” Sanger’s book reads. “They could see their keystrokes while actually watching them at their desks.”
Read more: American Cyber Security Firm FireEye Denies Hacking Chinese Military
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