[Wingman4l7]

Perhaps because foreign governments with a known antagonistic stance would happily sell or hand over your data in order to cause large-scale economic instability via account attacks, political instability via fostering the prosecution of minority groups (as identified by said data)... get creative. Large-scale data on your enemy's citizenry is a new weapon in the modern arsenal, and we haven't seen anyone really try to use it yet, but I suspect the results when they do will be ugly.

[anonym29]

Care to elaborate on "known antagonistic stance"? Is there any evidence that China has ever actually performed any of these types of attacks you're discussing?

"Get creative" might work well for fictional writing exercises, but is it such a sound strategy for assigning guilt? Surely you wouldn't like being prosecuted for crimes that someone "got creative" with in accusing you of, no?

[Wingman4l7]

No, because this particular attack is (as far as I know) a new concept, but in general, China being a major state sponsor of all sorts of large cyberattacks is very well-known (in security circles, at least) and has been extensively documented. The current likely scenario is that attacks would be performed against the US in the event that they tried to help defend Taiwan against Chinese invasion.