Security researchers have many names for the hacking group that is one of the suspects for the cyberattack on the US government’s Office of Personnel Management: PinkPanther, KungFu Kittens, Group 72 and, most famously, Deep Panda.
However, to Jared Myers and colleagues at cybersecurity company RSA, it is called Shell Crew and Myers’ team is one of the few who has watched it mid-assault — and eventually repulsed it.
Myers’ account of a months-long battle with the group illustrates the challenges governments and companies face in defending against hackers that researchers believe are linked to the Chinese government — a charge Beijing denies.
Photo: Reuters
“The Shell Crew is an extremely efficient and talented group,” Myers said in an interview.
Shell Crew, or Deep Panda, is one of several hacking groups that Western cybersecurity companies have accused of hacking into US and other countries’ networks and stealing government, defense and industrial documents.
The attack on the OPM computers, revealed this month, compromised the data of 4 million current and former federal employees, raising US suspicions that Chinese hackers were building huge databases that could be used to recruit spies.
China has denied any connection with such attacks and little is known about the identities of those involved in them. However, cybersecurity experts are starting to learn more about their methods.
Researchers have connected the OPM breach to an earlier attack on US healthcare insurer Anthem Inc, which has been blamed on Deep Panda.
Myers says his team has no evidence that Shell Crew were behind the OPM attack, but believes Shell Crew and Deep Panda are the same group. And they are no newcomers to cyberespionage.
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company which gave Deep Panda its name due to its perceived Chinese links, traces its activities to 2011, when it launched attacks on defense, energy and chemical industries in the US and Japan, but few have caught them in the act.
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