*Interesting theory here – the People's Liberation Army cyberwar units were going hack-crazy because they were on the take and somehow selling the proceeds under the table. Now they're calming down because it's not as easy to earn a living as it used to be.
*Maybe.
China cooling it with the hot-rodding
(…)
Many now believe that such groups have simply cut back on some of the noise that made them easy to detect. At the same time, China has probably refined its focus “from ‘vacuum cleaner’ espionage to more precisely targeted intrusion and theft,” says Greg Austin, a professorial fellow with the EastWest Institute and the author of Cyber Policy in China. State-sponsored hackers used to suck up large amounts of data and then sift through it later, he says. That may have artificially inflated the number of commercial attacks, as hackers targeting dual-use technologies like solar panels swept up pricing information along with design specifications. A switch to more directed national-security-related espionage would mean a reduction in perceived commercial cyberattacks.
In some cases, meanwhile, the likes of UglyGorilla may have been working under the table, without the explicit permission of the central government. The Unit 61398 indictment, for example, alleges that one state-owned enterprise “hired” the unit to “build a ‘secret’ database to hold corporate ‘intelligence.’”
Those explanations would help solve a number of long-standing mysteries….
