Special to WorldTribune.com

China’s government is now saying it not only wasn’t responsible for the cyberattack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and has arrested at least one of the hackers who carried out the attack.

The claim was made by state-run Xinhua news agency in a report on Dec. 2.

The report said an investigation determined the OPM hack was not state-sponsored. It did not, however, provide any details of who carried out the investigation or if the United States agreed with the probe’s conclusions.

Skeptics quickly chimed in that the report is merely China’s way of trying to “save face” and that the evidence of Beijing’s involvement in the OPM hack remains solid.

James Lewis, an expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said the claims made in the Xinhua report give Chinese authorities an out and enable them to valiantly say they have arrested one or more of the hackers behind the OPM breach and trot them out as criminals.

“It’s a face-saving way of saying: ‘It wasn’t us and we’ll put them in jail,’ ” Lewis said. “Traditional kabuki in espionage is you write off your agents when it’s politically useful to do so.”

John Hultquist, a cyber espionage expert with iSight Partners, said his firm believed the OPM cyberattack was carried out by hackers working for China’s government based on digital evidence and the hackers’ other targets, including health insurer Anthem.

“We can’t attribute it directly to a specific intelligence organization or office building in Beijing, (but) the writing is on the wall in terms of the evidence we do have,” said Hultquist, whose firm provides cyber intelligence to the U.S. government.

Several U.S. officials have said they believed from the outset that Beijing government entities were behind the OPM breach, which exposed the names, Social Security numbers and addresses of more than 22 million current and former U.S. federal employees and contractors, as well as 5.6 million fingerprints.

U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper, who in June had said the OPM breach was carried out by Chinese hackers but did not specifically accuse China’s government, told a Washington intelligence conference: “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did,” given the difficulty of the intrusion.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s Internet regulator, did not reply to a request for comment.

In Washington, OPM referred inquiries to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which also did not respond to a request for comment.

  Center for Strategic and International Studies, iSight Partners, U.S. officials not buying China’s story on cyberattack against U.S. Office of Personnel Management, WorldTribune.com