The Chinese (5 Chinese Army officers from Unit 61398) have been accused and indicted for stealing corporate secrets. The hacking the personnel records of Federal employees however hasn’t been officially attributed yet to them. This hasn’t deterred them at all.
Their specific target this time seems to have been those who applied for “Top Secret” clearance. That comprises thousands of employees. The hacking occurred in March of this year.
They apparently gained access to some databases of the office of Personnel Management before the penetration was detected. It isn’t clear how deep the penetration was into the information which includes “their foreign contacts, previous jobs and personal information like past drug use.” according to the New York Times which broke the story.
DHS responded,
“at this time,” neither the personnel agency nor Homeland Security had “identified any loss of personally identifiable information.” The official said an emergency response team was assigned “to assess and mitigate any risks identified.”- NYT
The attack was traced to China, but whether the hackers were governmental or not wasn’t clear.
Of course, we’ve apparently done the same to Huawei in order to find out if it was leeching information through backdoors in their devices.
The attack was never made public, although corporations have been encouraged to notify the public and the government about such attacks.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/world/asia/chinese-hackers-pursue-key-data-on-us-workers.html?_r=0