A recent American intelligence report claims a dedicated corps of hacker groups have not only cornered China’s data-based theft market, but that they also have the backing – or even the direction – of the Chinese government.

U.S. government officials have been sure to not blindly link cyber attacks to the Chinese government, which includes China’s Blue Army, a 30-strong commando cyberwarrior unit that claims to operate “for defensive reasons only.” (There’s no explicit mention of Blue Army in the report.) But there’s some hushed talk, according to the Associated Press, that enough stealthy operations have been traced back to the specific locations of a dozen groups connected to China’s People’s Liberation Army and a half-dozen nonmilitary actors that the U.S. could confidently peg it all on Beijing.

So for a nation as big as China, where nearly 490,000,000 people are online, is it at all surprising to hear that the cyberspying heft of the People’s Republic resides in an elite, shadowy core of a dozen or so teams? Not really. The question, here, is why is China employing this sort of 12-headed cyber dragon? And how, if at all, does this shadow bloc mesh with the Blue Army?

Read the rest at Motherboard.