China fingered as culprit behind the Marriott data breach

[Tipup]

OH LOOK, CHINA IS BEING BLAMED for cyber attacks again. This time it's being accused of carrying out the Marriott data breach, according to the New York Times.

The hack attack against the systems of the Marriott's Starwood Hotel brand saw some 500 million customers affected and threw the company under some heavy scrutiny.

And according to investigators looking into the situation, the hack can be traced back to China and attributed to cyber criminals working at the behest of China's civilian spy agency, the Ministry of State Security.

The data breach was supposedly part of an intelligence-gathering effort by China as opposed to a move to steal data and flog it on the dark web.

The hackers could be traced back to China thanks to the use of similar hacking tools previously used by China-linked hackers to breach other businesses.

This finger pointing at China comes at a time when the US has said it's facing increasing amours of attacks from the pseudo-socialist nation. Or at least that the point of view from former White House cyber adviser for President Trump and National Security Agency official Rob Joyce.

"You worry they are prepositioning against critical infrastructure and trying to be able to do the types of disruptive operations that would be the most concern," Joyce said at a Wall Street Journal cybersecurity conference, reported Reuters.

It's worth noting that Joyce didn't serve up any evidence of increased cyber attacks by China against the US. But a spokeswoman for the NSA did say that he was referring to hacks made against US energy, financial, healthcare and transport sectors.

While China has always denied such attacks, the US nevertheless keeps throwing cybersecurity shade at it, including working on hacking charges against Chinese national is claims were involved in a Chinese cyber espionage operation called "Cloudhopper".

We somehow don't expect China will be to keen to handover those citizens facing charges and we suspect tensions between the two nations over cybersecurity won't dissipate in 2019. µ