According to a recent report by FireEye Inc, a group of Chinese hackers has been spying on and hacking into governments and other major international bodies in India and Southeast Asia unchecked for at least a decade. What’s more, the report claimed that the scale and level of complexity of the hacking actions since 2005 have led them to conclude that the campaign is very likely to have been state sponsored, raising questions about the current Chinese administration.

The Chinese government have come out and reasserted their position that they wholeheartedly seek to clamp down on any activity of this nature carried out from within its borders. Interestingly, they stopped short of denying their involvement in this specific incident though. 

The report did not attempt to estimate the overall size of the hacking group involved in this activity, but it did state that it likely contained at least two software developers able to keep evolving and refining the group’s methods. These methods were so successful in concealing them from the authorities that they were able to reuse some of their tactics and malware repeatedly to undertake cyber-attacks.

The major thing that sets the activity of this group apart from similar organisations, like Anonymous, is the sheer scale of its operations. FireEye even described evidence that it found of the group organising a shift pattern in order to deal with the workload generated by its cyber-attack campaign, which focused on sending out phishing emails that showed themselves as coming from friendly and trustworthy sources.

The real worry here for the governments and major organisations in the region is that given the hugely successful way that the group were able to keep themselves and their attacks concealed for such a lengthy period, it's almost impossible to gauge what they have already stolen and what the future impact may be.

The campaign has caused enough worry in Thailand that the government has proposed updating laws around hacking, which, if left unchecked, may leave the country vulnerable in the future. Not only is the decade long campaign a big story now, but it could continue to be one well into the future.ent has proposed updating laws around hacking, which, if left unc