[dmix]

IMO the real goal is HUMINT, getting access to a list of people with security clearance (including all of their personal information) meaning China can now easily target them individually. Blackmail or pay them off, convert them to informants/spies within the postal system. A postal system now flush with tons of data about every American citizen.

It's much easier to have people embedded in the system, long term, extracting data... than it is to exfiltrate data remotely from China via hacking.

The data these people have access to is quite an important intelligence asset:

> the Chinese may be assuming that the U.S. Postal Service is more like theirs — a state-owned entity that has vast amounts of data on its citizens, said James A. Lewis, a cyber-policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Second, he said, the trend in intelligence is the same as in the commercial sector: amass big sets of data that can be analyzed for previously unknown links or insights.

[at-fates-hands]

>>>>> The data these people have access to is quite an important intelligence asset:

My question would be why it took them so long to go after the postal service if they've thought it was such a high value target??

[dwild]

Everything is relative, including time. Nothing tell us how long they were trying to attack USPS or even how they were trying. This is just a case were they tried to do it one way, they succeeded and they got caught. There's probably multiple incident that public doesn't know or even that intelligence services doesn't know.