HP Enterprise Stock Slides After WSJ Report Company Was “Overrun” With Chinese Hackers

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) stock is sliding after a solid open following an investigative report from The Wall Street Journal found the  company was “overrun” with Chinese hackers.

The hackers allegedly came in through cloud service providers, where companies thought their data was safely stored; and as WSJ notes, once they got in, they could freely and anonymously hop from client to client, and defied investigators’ attempts to kick them out for years.

WSJ notes that cybersecurity investigators first identified aspects of the hack, called Cloud Hopper by the security researchers who first uncovered it, in 2016, and U.S. prosecutors charged two Chinese nationals for the global operation last December. The two men remain at large.

Cloud Hopper was something new for APT10 (short for Advanced Persistent Threat), one of China’s most evasive hacking collectives, according to researchers.

“You know the old joke of, why rob a bank?” said Anne Neuberger, the chief of the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate. “Because that’s where the money is.”

A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the attack was much bigger than previously known.

It goes far beyond the 14 unnamed companies listed in the indictment, stretching across at least a dozen cloud providers, including CGI Group, one of Canada’s largest cloud companies; Tieto Oyj, a major Finnish IT services company; and IBM.

HPE spokesman Adam Bauer said the company “worked diligently to remediate these intrusions for our customers,” adding that “the security of customer data is our top priority.”

“We strongly dispute any allegation that HPE was anything less than fully cooperative with government authorities from the outset,” Mr. Bauer said. “To suggest otherwise is patently false.”

And all of this breaks just days ahead of a planned visit to Washington by Chinese officials to sign thee phase one trade deal…