They can't verify that was Gao, that the poster represented that company, or show that they occupied the office building with the other company.
>Are there a lot of advanced Chinese black hat hackers that don't work with the Chinese government? Because it seems like there are a lot of advanced Chinese hackers that work for the government
Any hack reported by the western media immediately gets linked to the government, no matter how thin the evidence is. Chinese people can be smart and motivated by greed too, and they have a ton of people.
If you personally think China is behind this based on the released evidence, that's fine. Using it as justification for attacks on the Chinese requires more proof to even be considered.
The October hack of Facebook[1] didn't seem to be blamed on any government by the media. It seems to me like a fairly sophisticated attack that could have been done by a government.
And the western media blames some hacks on the US government and its allies as well[2][3].
> Chinese people can be smart and motivated by greed too
How do they plan to make money by hacking NASA and the US military's shipbuilder? They're not installing ransomware asking for bitcoin payment. If they want to hack for money, I would think they would target credit cards, or banks, or better yet: cryptocurrency exchanges. Or maybe popular websites whose databases they can use for credential stuffing. One way to make money by hacking NASA is to be paid by the Chinese government.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/technology/facebook-hack-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-yandex-exclusiv...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/middleeast/30worm.h...
Sorry, I should have said "any hack originating in China." Poor wording on my part.
>How do they plan to make money by hacking NASA and the US military's shipbuilder?
Their methods were to gain access to a machine, and then try to use that access to jump to client servers. There's nothing saying NASA or government contactor's were specifically targeted, but seem like excellent jump targets if an opportunity arose.
There's other stuff there. For example Gao was recruiting for Laoying Baichen Instruments which shares an address with CNITSEC (which is run by MSS). CNITSEC has in the past been confirmed to work with APT3.
>The alternative is that they are black hat hackers, which is very likely.
Are there a lot of advanced Chinese black hat hackers that don't work with the Chinese government? Because it seems like there are a lot of advanced Chinese hackers that work for the government. For example APT3 and APT1. Also the APT10 stuff appears to have happened during Chinese working hours, which is indicative of government work[1].
[1] https://intrusiontruth.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/was-apt10-th...