The answer to question #1 is, no, we cannot believe them; and the answer to question #2 is that because of their answers we cannot trust them – and none of that is American bashing, it’s simple networking.

How do they know that it was the Chinese, and specifically the PLA? How can they?

If you’re a PLA hacker are you gonna launch your attack from a PLA barracks?

If you’re a Chinese super hacker spy, either living at home, or on assignment in south America are you gonna launch your attack from the spy office? The Chinese embassy?

No, you’re not, and most certainly not if you’ve got the smarts to actually have a realistic chance of getting anywhere close to something good. The first rule of hacking is “thou shalt not hack from where you can get traced back to” – and anyone smart enough to get into that sort of system knows that.

If I was gonna attempt this, and let it be known right up front that I have enough smarts to know that I don’t have anywhere near the smarts to needed to even come close to accomplishing such a thing, I certainly wouldn’t do it from my living room where my IP address could be traced directly back to my bank account.

That would be dumber that that bag of hammers we used to hear about so much wouldn’t it?

Maybe I’d compromise a machine on some other network, some corporate wireless network with lax wireless security so that the point of attack wouldn’t be from my living room.

Maybe I’d go on vacation to some other country and compromise some unsuspecting network there so that the attack didn’t come from my hotel room.

Maybe I’d go to Bulgaria and tap into one of the endless lists of unsecured networks in Turkey.

Is the theory behind this starting to become somewhat clearer? The Pentagon can tell the network where the attack came from, but it cannot tell who launched the attack, or from where.

So while they may well have detected an attack launched from a Chinese network that does not mean that the hacker was either Chinese, or even sitting at a keyboard in China.

The sort of news they’re letting go sounds really good on the face of it all, especially if you connect American statements on the Chinese military buildup in light of the recent trouble with Chinese products entering the US, but if it’s given any thought at all it starts to become suspect rather quickly.

If I thought my network would be hacked, I would devise a virus and store it in a file on my server entitled “Super-Extra-Mega-Top-Secret”. What foreign power would not try to access that file? A good way to teach someone a lesson.

They may be. But I’m not sure why anyone would doubt that the Chinese are trying to hack the Pentagon. Spies spy. That’s what they do.

Do you doubt that the Pentagon is hacking the Chinese, AND the Israelis, and the Russians, and us? And vice versa? Would any of that surprise any of us?

“[2] Given recent the American intelligence community track record on “certainties” can we trust the accuracy of these anonymous statements?”

See (1).

“[3] If someone did get in do ya suppose they got anything useful?”

Not being very knowledgeable about the world of intelligence gathering, who knows? I’m inclined to think the US is probably better at this sort of thing than the Chinese, but who can say?