The Office of the Personnel Management in the United States has been recently the target of cyber attacks, and authorities have named some of the possible suspects in the cyber war that escalated after the illegal monitoring have been traced.

According to Reuters, Jared Myers of RSA identified the hackers as KungFu Kittens, Group 72, Pink Panther, or its most prominent name "Deep Panda." While the group attacks in different cyber names, Myers believe they are the "Shell Crew." Myers and his group has been very vigilant on the attacks, trying to protect the government from being hacked, linking the cyber nuisance to the Chinese government.

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Myers said, "The Shell Crew is an extremely efficient and talented group." Deep Panda, also known as the Shell Crew, is just one of the few but powerful hackers known to have had access to private and extremely confidential documents of the United States and other countries. While China is bent on denying the allegations thrown at them, it is reported that some patterns of the hacking incidents deliberately points to them.

It can be noted that the attack that happened at the Office of the Personnel Management gave way to confidential information of about 4 million federal employees.

Deep Panda has also been linked to the recent attack on U.S. health care Insurer Anthem Inc. While Myers' group have no concrete evidence about the Shell Crew's involvement with the Office of the Personnel Management attack, they strongly believe that Shell Crew is also connected to Deep Panda, if not one and the same.

However, in a report by IBTimes, FireEye, an independent cyber security firm, contradicted Myers' report stating that the hackers responsible in the OPM incident were not the same as those who hacked the U.S. health care insurer.

Mike Opennheim of FireEye said, "We think, this group uses similar back doors to Deep Panda to obtain access to a network, but then uses different tactics once they get access to the network."

It is not clear whether Shell Crew is connected to any of Beijing's officials, or even have the capital's support; however, Crowdstrike, another cyber security firm, threw the first blame on Deep Panda.

TagsCyber Attack, cyberwar, Deep Panda, hacking