Wired magazine is reporting here that China’s Advanced Persistent Threat group 41 (APT41) has hacked American state governments. No one has a clue what information they are stealing, but it could be that they are adding to their collection of data about individuals. If they could get access to different Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, that would complement what the Chinese already have from massive hacks against Marriott, Equifax, the U.S. Department of Personnel Management, health care systems and other targets. My bet is that the Chinese are able to extract profiles from these different data sets about Americans of interest, whether they are government decision-makers or technologists. If you can learn about someone’s health, finances, travel record and perhaps driving record, you can assemble a useful profile. There has never been any evidence that the Chinese are doing this, but it’s what the intelligence community suspects.
