14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Chinese officials have already arrested the people behind the massive Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breach that took place earlier this year, the Washington Post reports.
The arrests took place just days before the Chinese president visited the US for the signing of the US - China anti-spying pact in late September.
We already reported the arrests when they happened, but Chinese officials only described them as "hackers that carried out attacks against US targets," without revealing their names or reason of arrest.
Now, according to information provided by the Chinese government, the suspects arrested in early September are directly accused of the OPM hack, and Chinese state officials have denied any involvement in the incident, claiming the OPM data breach was not part of any state-sponsored cyber-espionage campaign, but merely the work of an underground cyber-crime group.
US officials have refrained from comments, but the ones that did have said they are circumspect to believe Chinese officials and don't think that the people arrested are the actual hackers, since China, as with any other communist countries, have a history of "suspicious" arrests.
The anti-spying pact is just a waste of everybody's time
Surprisingly or not, there are some coincidences in this piece of news that just came out of Beijing.
The initial arrests were announced in September, just before the Xi - Obama meetings, and many considered them as a sign of good faith and a way to avoid the US in imposing economic sanctions on some Chinese companies.
This second news item, that the previously-arrested hackers are actually responsible for the OPM hack, was also revealed just before meetings between the China's Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun and the US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.
If we take into account multiple reports that said that China continued to hack US targets after the anti-spying pact was signed, we may arrive at the conclusion that Chinese officials are merely leading US officials up the garden path, and have no other intentions to stop spying on their counterparts. So much for the anti-spying pact and all the subsequent political charade.
In the meantime, for OPM victims, the Defense Department has set up a special website (not accessible worldwide) where they can check if their data or fingerprints have been stolen.