Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee said Sunday that China was clearly behind the recent cyberhacking of the federal Office of Personnel Management that compromised the data of an estimated 4 million federal employees. He called it “the most significant breach of federal networks in U.S. history.”
The hack lacked the attributes of a financial crime, such as stealing credit card information and instead sought out personal information of political and federal appointees, with the apparent intention of leveraging the information to recruit spies or blackmail people, noted McCaul.
He emphasized this was his own determination based on the evidence, not an official determination by U.S. intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, he said it was the only logical conclusion.
“In my judgement, this was an attack by China against the United States government. It [qualifies] as espionage,” McCaul told CBS’s “Face the Nation” show. “That has not been confirmed by the U.S. government but I believe, in my judgment, that all of the threat indicators point to the fact that it is China and nation-state sponsored because of the way it was done.”
He added that the U.S. was still learning how to deal with this kind of cyberwarfare. “This is an area where there are no rules of the game in terms of espionage, in terms of stealing this kind of information,” McCaul said.
