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Comment by DavidWanjiru | Hacker News Reader

What criteria is used to determine that malware could only possibly have been made by a nation state? If all it takes is specialist teams and a budget in the millions of dollars (presumably, had it been 10s or 100s of millions, that's what they'd call it), lot's of private entities can pull that together, can't they?

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They simply pretend that all skilled attackers are state actors.

Due to how the industry works, they're usually correct.

They probably could, but would they?

At least in the US, publicly traded tech companies are accountable to shareholders: There's some transparency in the accounting, and it's hard for them to throw millions of dollars at a problem before shareholders start asking tough questions.

But a military contractor type of company has lots of obfuscation leeway with "top secret" type of things, doesn't it? And I'd imagine a defence contractor is the type of company that would be interested in the kind of info this kind of malware can gather.

There is some evidence that CITIC Group, a Chinese company, is heavily involved in corporate espionage and the manipulation of foreign nations. There's no particular reason that other large companies, no matter their home countries, could not also be engaged in these types of activities.

link: http://www.securityweek.com/chinese-attackers-conduct-cybere...

My gut feel is that governments have a much more significant ability to do things such as: "hey, we're going to do this thing and you're not entitled to ask about it" than private sector.

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