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Comment by enkid | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone getting the sense that there are a lot of weird comments in this thread? Why are there so many comments doubting the idea that FireEye could have been hacked by a nation state actor? It's just really weird that so many people are saying similar things without directly contributing. Not to be paranoid, bit it's the type of behaviour I would expect from a nation state trying to place doubt in the narrative that they were hacking commercial companies...

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Most of the comments seem to be doubting that the attack was as advanced as FireEye claim. IE not that they got hacked, but rather that it wouldn't necessarily have taken a nation-state to do it. And therefore that just about any nation-state who did want to could have.

Not sure if you work in the security industry or not, but often times people that work in the industry learn to understand it’s just not that hard to pop a majority of enterprise systems. Not sure if this due to knowing where all the bodies are buried or what.

It does seem paranoid to think that someone viewing something like this with scepticism makes them a state actor. I think there have been too many incidents of companies crying wolf for people to think otherwise. This is a forum for discussion and to accuse people with alternative views of being state actors probably just adds fuel to the fire.

But all of these comments are fundamentally not helpful either. They all basically boil down to calling FireEye unreliable, which is fine if you actually back it up with discussion. But that's not what they are doing. They just assert that FireEye can't be believed without any reasoning or evidence.

I think one reason is that easily-breached enterprises have used such language in many forms over the years to try to excuse themselves from being weak on security. So when one credibly gets hacked by an actual state actor, the words conjure up the false claims.

I'm not tied in any way to a nation state hacking group, and through my albeit limited experience in cybersecurity it's clear to me that most attacks attributed to nation state actors could probably have been done by private ventures.

And there is, of course, very strong incentive to make such claims.

I'd imagine my experience isn't unique, and that many people came to the same conclusion.

I'd say that your conclusion isn't warranted.

There have been comments stating with high detail why exactly it's probably not a nation state actor, but ultimately it's a case of the burden of proof being on the party that makes the claim, and generally those parties just can't substantiate it.

It’s a widespread talking point among the QAnon crowd.

See for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/pompeo-says... https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/24/crowdstrike-trump-impea...

Russian government doesn’t do any hacking, it’s all a fabrication by the Democrats :)

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