My guess is they counter-hacked the PLA’s 54th Research Institute to identify the culprits, then used parallel construction for the indictment.

IIRC, the public intelligence report on the Russian 2016 election influence campaign revealed that the US had counter-hacked some of the Russian groups involved, and used the information gained from that as evidence to attribute the overall campaign to the Russians.

I'm sure he does. You've been introducing several confusions into this subthread, and the above is one of them.

If there's been any national confusion on this topic, it's been between the Dutch and the Americans.

Your reply to that comment was about Russia, so everything from that on down was probably a waste of time. Then again, we're talking about DoJ indictments of foreign soldiers for allegedly accessing data that was open to all, so the whole thing has been a waste of time from the beginning. It's a good thing there isn't any real crime in USA for DoJ to investigate.

Can you even follow the thread? The TFA is an American indictment against some Chinese government hackers. There are some unanswered questions about it, which were partially answered by speculation informed by parallels to a similar indictment against Russian government hackers [1] and related reporting [2].

[1] See https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/grand-jury-indicts-12-russian...: "In 2016, officials in Unit 26165 began spearphishing volunteers and employees of the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, including the campaign’s chairman. Through that process, officials in this unit were able to steal the usernames and passwords for numerous individuals and use those credentials to steal email content and hack into other computers. They also were able to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)..."

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...: "The information gathered during the surveillance, Modderkolk’s sources suggested, was key to the US intelligence agencies’ attribution of the DNC breach to Russia."

Indictments don't contain evidence. Sometimes they contain rumors of evidence.

I just noticed that you made a pretty mind-boggling claim there. Is it really your position that Equifax's data was "data that was open to all"?

> There was an unsubstantiated claim that something had happened in one nation, therefore we can assume it happened in some other nation!

No, we can make informed speculation in a discussion. That's quite different than "assuming it [actually] happened."

The main issue here is that you appear to read something, misunderstand or exaggerate it into hyperbole, then respond to your own hyperbole. That's not a good way to have a discussion with anyone.

If you knew anything about cybercrime attribution, you'd know that indictment was detailed far beyond anything we've ever seen from the DOJ. They took the extraordinary step of giving away hints on collection sources/methods just to make the evidence overwhelming and undeniable.

Which was my point, which instead of addressing you keep trying to obfuscate. Because you are a troll.

Cut out the trolling, please. It's neither clever nor valuable in the slightest, and just increases the noise level.

The "war" you referenced btw, the one we are discussing in this thread, is against the US. Do tell us how the Chinese Military hacking American private companies is somehow the fault of America.

https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch-intelligence-...

The case will never go to court. The DOJ knows it so they don't have to have actual evidence.

The indicment is being publicised for political reasons.

The Chinese are a bogeyman comparable to the Russians. Being tough on them and have the other party being in bed with them is something that is surely useful in a coming election campaign.

As for the ability to trace back traffic sent through 30+ computers placed around the world including China; just think of what surveillance and logging that would entail. It is not really possible.

See my mysteriously flagged comment demonstrating exactly this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290767

Of course, we don’t know who TSB were. But it’s not like individual NSA hackers have gone unidentified.

Then DOJ would have to reveal their sources, wouldn’t they?

[0] https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/09/16/were-now-o...

Of course not, that would be idiotic, and horrible for morale. You don't give your own people up, regardless of whether or not they are innocent or guilty.

As such, this is a spherical cow thought experiment. To address it - it's quite likely that the sources would not be revealed in an open trial, due to the catch-all of national security. For a helping of double irony, the sources are likely the product of... Espionage (Digital or otherwise).

Also consider how US treats 'threats to national security' - Chelsea manning, indefinite detention in Guantanamo bay, etc.

This is also why the US is not even a signatory of the ICC. It, by principle, opposes the sheer notion of Americans facing international trials for war crimes, even in impartial, third party courts. There's no way in hell it would extradite its spies to face trials for computer crimes.

It's arguments for not participating in the ICC are that the trials would be political, and not impartial. That's a stick with two ends.

[1] https://twitter.com/intrusion_truth

Did the DOJ just indict a bunch of procurement people? ;-)

If they made it public, they could never do it again.

You don't see foreign governments identifying individual NSA employees when the NSA hacks into something...

I suspect that it does happen, but most people don't know about it because that requires knowing another language, and then regularly keeping up with the media of another country in that language.