If China Hacked Marriott, 2014 Marked a Full-on Assault

The massive data breach that affected 500 million Marriott customers feels like a recent event, given that the company just discovered and disclosed it over the past four months. But it's important to remember that the attack began much earlier, especially as Reuters and others have reported that state-sponsored Chinese hackers were behind it. If that attribution holds up, China's broader hacking campaign against the US in 2014 will go down as a historic assault.

China's role in the Marriott hack remains unconfirmed, but the accusation comes amid already heightened tensions between the United States and China over trade and intellectual property theft. The Department of Justice is expected to announce indictments against a new wave of Chinese hackers soon.

If China did perpetrate the Marriott hack in 2014, though, that would make it just one of several devastating, roughly concurrent cyberattacks against the United States. That same year, Chinese actors pilfered extremely sensitive and expansive data on tens of millions of US citizens from the Office of Personnel Management. That assault appears to have begun during the first months of 2014—initially detected by OPM in March of that year. And in February 2014, Chinese hackers allegedly breached Anthem insurance, stealing the names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers, and even income data of 80 million people.