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MODUS OPERANDUS: The cyberspies typically enter targeted computer networks through "spearfishing" attacks, in which a company official receives a creatively disguised email and is tricked into clicking on a link or attachment that then opens a secret door for the hackers, Mandiant says. The cyberspies would steal and retransmit data for an average of just under a year, but in some cases more than four years. Information technology companies were their favorite targets, followed by aerospace firms, pointing to a key area of interest as China seeks to develop its own cutting-edge civilian and military aircraft. ONLINE HANDLES: Mandiant identifies three of the unit's hackers by their screen names. It says one of them, "UglyGorilla," was first detected in a 2004 online forum posing a question to a cybersecurity expert about whether China needed a dedicated force to square off against an online cohort being mustered by the United States. The user of another screen name, "Dota," appears to be a fan of Harry Potter; Mandiant said references to the book and movie character appear as answers to his computer security questions. Unit 61398 hackers were sometimes identified as the "Comment Crew" by security companies due to their practice of inserting secret backdoors into systems by using code embedded in comments on websites. REVEALING TWEETS: And what helped Mandiant track down the source of hacking into more than 140 companies and organizations from the U.S. and elsewhere? Facebook and Twitter. China's "Great Firewall" of Internet filtering blocks those U.S.-based social networks, but Unit 61398 operators got around that by accessing them directly from the unit's system. Mandiant was able to see that Facebook and Twitter accounts were being accessed from Internet Protocol addresses connected to the unit. It's not clear whether those accounts aided in hacking or were simply for the hackers' personal use. "These actors have made poor operational security choices, facilitating our research and allowing us to track their activities," the report says.
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