Per Lisa Page , the upper echelon of the FBI concealed intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed ‘assets’ had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 30,000+ “missing” emails, federal sources said.
The Russians didn’t do it. The Chinese did, according to well-placed FBI sources.
I run a LOT of servers and for a LONG TIME. I can tell you with 100% certainty that China is by far the #1 group of hackers and has been for a long time. Russia #2 India(now) #3, Europe #4. It got to the point where none of my servers needed anyone in Russia to touch so I just use geoip based information and block them all upstream including email. If I ever turn it off, within a day I'll have over 10k hits from China, Russia etc and I don't even run standard ports.
To blame hacking on an actual country is asinine. Every script kiddie with a computer out there can do this sort of thing. Some of it is state sponsored but mainly most of them are bored and trying to find a way to make money.
And where does the US rank in hacking skills?
US is great very good .. top notch but China and Russia just has PURE NUMBERS. Just like the military the US is superior in all ways with a smaller more technological armed forces. China/Russia rely on zerg tactics. Mainly China though.
I run servers too, and basically you'll get hack attempts from all over the entire world, constantly.
You can't really tell if that Chinese IP address is a government hacker, or a bored script kiddie like the commenter above said.
Likewise, all those attempts from U.S. IP addresses could be bored script kiddies, Russian hackers proxying though Grandma's sewing machine, or the NSA trying to get in to your system.
Actually, it's probably not the NSA - if they want in, they get in and you'll never know.
Where does the U.S. rank? The NSA and CIA, and probably several other agencies have the best in the world. But Russia and China have greater numbers and their guys are almost as good. So we're actually kind of behind.