Report: Chinese Cyber Division Attacking U.S.
O'BRIEN: New report out says a secret unit of the Chinese military is behind a massive computer hacking campaign against the United States. The report comes from U.S. security firm Mandiant and says the cyber division the People's Liberation Army is responsible for the hacking and they might be operating out of this white 12-story tower in Shanghai, China. Now, China has been blacking out CNN's broadcast signal whenever we talk about hacking out of China, no surprise there. Grady Summers, the Vice President of Customer Success at Mandiant, nice to have you with us. Walk me through the proof, what you know about not only the hacking scandal but what ties it to this particular building.</s>GRADY SUMMERS, VICE PRESIDENT OF CUSTOMER SUCCESS, MANDIANT: Sure, Soledad. What we've done is lay out 60 pages of evidence in our report, including 3,000 digital indicators and actual video of the attackers doing their dirty work on victim machines. So this is not a baseless, casual allegation. This is based on six years of research and we provide a lot of data to back up our assertions.</s>O'BRIEN: Walk me through the victims back in the United States, who actually were the targets. Is it government targets? Is it corporate targets? Is it individual targets?</s>SUMMERS: Sure. It's actually mostly commercial, corporate targets. It's really a who's who of American companies. Of the 141 victims worldwide, 115 of them were in the U.S. and it's a blue chip roster of companies in aerospace, defense, transportation, financial services, biofuel, clean technology -- 20 different industries that we counted were targeted by this group APT1.</s>O'BRIEN: You name this group Comment Crew. Talk to me about Comment Crew and sort of how they came together and what they do.</s>SUMMERS: Right, Comment Crew is a name that a lot of security researchers had given to this group we called APT1. They're called that because of the way that they do of what's called command and control, the way they talk to their servers on the Internet. But what's most important is the evidence we provided that links this Comment Crew, or APT1, to a unit of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Unit 61398. That's important, because this is the first time that researchers like Mandiant have been able to establish that link. We've long thought that these attacks have come from China. Now we've given evidence to show that not only do they come from China but they are actually sponsored by the Chinese government.</s>BROWNSTEIN: So Mr. Summers, Ron Brownstein from the "National Journal". Is the response only to toughen our defenses, or can you go on the offense once you know what the target -- who is -- who is generating the attacks?</s>SUMMERS: Yes, we actually don't advocate going on the offense, which in fact creates more problems than it solves. It's really a popular thing to talk about nowadays, but we believe there's no technical or legislative problem -- solution to this problem. We think it's going to be a combination of better defense by organizations, but also diplomatic pressure that Washington can bring to bear on Beijing on this matter.</s>O'BRIEN: When you listen to the Chinese officials, their answer in part has been, yes, well, we're the target of U.S. hacking, so there. So how do you bring diplomatic pressure if that's kind of the starting point?</s>SUMMERS: I think it's very different. Certainly, they're alluding to the things we've all read about in the past where certain countries are attacking other countries, but never before have we seen one state-sponsored entity like Unit 61398 of the Chinese PLA attacking helpless commercial organizations in other countries. This is not government against government. This is a very well-financed, well- resourced government entity attacking organizations who aren't prepared to deal with that kind of an onslaught.</s>O'BRIEN: It's a scary report. All right, Grady Summers with us this morning. Thanks, I appreciate the update from you this morning.</s>SUMMERS: Thank you.</s>O'BRIEN: We've got to take a short break. Still ahead, a rare disease cripples a young man to the point where he cannot walk. He's in a wheelchair. But by a pretty drastic effort by his brother, he's out of bed, now even driving a car. We'll tell you how he turned his life around, coming up next.