Sunday, September 6, 2015

Beijing expected to escape US hacking sanctions

Looming sanctions aimed at Chinese interests suspected of stealing and profiting from U.S. trade secrets are unlikely to directly target Beijing, as the White House is expected to go after companies instead of foreign governments.

A series of leaked comments from unnamed White House sources over the past few days has revealed that sanctions against hackers are now in the works. But experts say they wont apply to cyberattacks like the recent hack of the federal Office of Professional Management, which compromised the personal information of millions of f workers and is widely considered to be the work of state-backed hackers.

That’s because the Obama administration is wary of imposing sanctions for normal state-sponsored intelligence gathering tactics the U.S. government itself employs on an ongoing basis.

“[OPM] is something that the federal government looks at as a legitimate intelligence target that we as a government failed to protect,” said Rob Knake, a former White House cyber official and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It does not fall outside the bounds of what intelligence agencies traditionally want to know.”

As a matter of policy, the U.S. has tried to draw a line in the sand between hacking for intelligence-gathering purposes and hacking for commercial gain.

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/252703-beijing-expected-to-escape-us-hacking-sanctions

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