As Hacking Against U.S. Rises, Experts Try to Pin Down Motive

By NICOLE PERLROTH, DAVID E. SANGER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, NYT

SAN FRANCISCO — When Telvent, a company that monitors more than half the oil and gas pipelines in North America, discovered last September that the Chinese had hacked into its computer systems, it immediately shut down remote access to its clients’ systems.

Company officials and American intelligence agencies then grappled with a fundamental question: Why had the Chinese done it?

Was the People’s Liberation Army, which is suspected of being behind the hacking group, trying to plant bugs into the system so they could cut off energy supplies and shut down the power grid if the United States and China ever confronted each other in the Pacific? Or were the Chinese hackers just trolling for industrial secrets, trying to rip off the technology and pass it along to China’s own energy companies?

“We are still trying to figure it out,” a senior American intelligence official said last week. “They could have been doing both.”

(More here.)