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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

An interesting side-note on Mandiant's report:

And of course Mandiant's not just releasing this information for fun. Chinese hacking is big business for them. Brad Stone and Michael Riley reported earlier this month for Businessweek that Mandiant's 2012 revenue of more than $100 million represented a 76 percent year-on-year increase. They say they represent 30 percent of the Fortune 100. Mandiant is so dominant in the China-focused counter-espionage game that the New York Times' reporting on the Mandiant report and other sources of information abotu Chinese hacking had to include an awkward disclaimer

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/02/19/mandiant_is_t...

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Mandiant report debunked:

Part 1: http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers-an...

Part 2: http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers-an...

Part 3: http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers-an...

EDIT: Updated to include links to all three parts

that 'debunking' is full of such impossibly bad writing i have no choice but to dismiss it. I cant say Mandiant is correct either, but at least they know how to construct a sentence.

So non-native speakers should be dismissed?

When their first blog post was 6 days ago and they smell strongly of disinformation, yes.

perhaps i spoke too soon, reading from Part I instead of Part III is much more coherent.

I opened the provided link, read a few paragraphs, scanned the rest of the post, and decided that the post does not contain a complete thought. In my opinion part III (the linked part) is substantially worse than parts I and II and the OP does a severe dis-service by linking the third part directly.

Additionally the math flagged my BS detector, which doesnt say the rest is wrong, but makes me even more wary since this is the only part i have enough facts about to make a complete decision on:

| The breakdown per minute at this pace equals 396 megabytes per minute 6.6 megabytes per second to pull this off non-stop for 10 months straight.

https://www.google.com/search?q=6.6TB/10%20months

https://www.google.com/search?q=6.6%20mb/s%20*%2010months

If they can't do simple math, yes. In their "debunking" they forgot that a day is not equal to an hour, and most of it is nonsensical.

No, but my brain broke trying to if there is a shred of logic in their posts.

There is a lot of jealousy between security companies, especially since Mandiant is getting a lot of the spotlight with the China hacks.

The way those posts are written with personal attacks against particular people I wouldn't be surprised if it was written by somebody at a competing firm.

That's quite plausible. I think the posts are worth reading to remind oneself that healthy skepticism is a good thing.

"Investigators say the surge of malware attacks on U.S. companies may be coming from Eastern European cybercriminals rather than being Chinese state-sponsored espionage."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57570194-83/apple-facebook-...

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