FBI Investigating Hack Reportedly Perpetrated By Chinese Military

Just before the year ends, 2016 adds a reported Chinese hacking incident to the list of things that the U.S. has had to endure. First is the Russian interference during the recently-concluded U.S. presidential election, then there’s the ongoing OurMine hacking campaign. It seems that this year is just rife with digital attacks in some way or other. This time around, the target is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which the FBI is currently looking into.

To be fair, however, it would seem that the FDIC hack is old news since it has apparently been going on since 2010. Now, the FBI is trying to figure out how this was allowed to happen. Although no piece of concrete evidence implicates the Chinese military as of yet, the direction of the investigation seems to be going that way, CNBC reports.

According to sources who have knowledge of the hacks and the investigation, the cyber-attacks are believed to have been committed by groups or individuals that have been or are being sponsored by the military branch of the Chinese government. As a result of the hack, dozens of the corporation’s computers became vulnerable to outside access, including that of the former chairwoman of the FDIC, Sheila Bair.

With the FDIC occupying such an important role in the functioning of the federal government, largely thanks to its position as one of the biggest financial agencies of the U.S. government, this is a huge threat to international relations. Not only does the federal entity hold information on the largest banks in the country, it also has data on millions of American bank accounts.

In 2015 alone, there were over 159 cases of data breaches at the FDIC according to the agency’s own admission, Reuters reports. In its report to Congress, the FDIC labeled seven of those cases to have been major incidents.