Entries Tagged "China"

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FBI Shuts Down Chinese Botnet

The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers:

The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sensitive networks related to universities, government agencies, telecommunications providers, and media organizations…. The botnet was launched in mid-2021, according to the FBI, and infected roughly 260,000 devices as of June 2024.

The operation to dismantle the botnet was coordinated by the FBI, the NSA, and the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), according to a press release dated Wednesday. The U.S. Department of Justice received a court order to take control of the botnet infrastructure by sending disabling commands to the malware on infected devices. The hackers tried to counterattack by hitting FBI infrastructure but were “ultimately unsuccessful,” according to the law enforcement agency.

Posted on September 19, 2024 at 11:40 AM • View Comments

US Cyber Safety Review Board on the 2023 Microsoft Exchange Hack

The US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack by the Chinese government that accessed the emails of senior US government officials.

From the executive summary:

The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred. The Board also concludes that Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul, particularly in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations. The Board reaches this conclusion based on:

  1. the cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors that allowed this intrusion to succeed;
  2. Microsoft’s failure to detect the compromise of its cryptographic crown jewels on its own, relying instead on a customer to reach out to identify anomalies the customer had observed;
  3. the Board’s assessment of security practices at other cloud service providers, which maintained security controls that Microsoft did not;
  4. Microsoft’s failure to detect a compromise of an employee’s laptop from a recently acquired company prior to allowing it to connect to Microsoft’s corporate network in 2021;
  5. Microsoft’s decision not to correct, in a timely manner, its inaccurate public statements about this incident, including a corporate statement that Microsoft believed it had determined the likely root cause of the intrusion when in fact, it still has not; even though Microsoft acknowledged to the Board in November 2023 that its September 6, 2023 blog post about the root cause was inaccurate, it did not update that post until March 12, 2024, as the Board was concluding its review and only after the Board’s repeated questioning about Microsoft’s plans to issue a correction;
  6. the Board’s observation of a separate incident, disclosed by Microsoft in January 2024, the investigation of which was not in the purview of the Board’s review, which revealed a compromise that allowed a different nation-state actor to access highly-sensitive Microsoft corporate email accounts, source code repositories, and internal systems; and
  7. how Microsoft’s ubiquitous and critical products, which underpin essential services that support national security, the foundations of our economy, and public health and safety, require the company to demonstrate the highest standards of security, accountability, and transparency.

The report includes a bunch of recommendations. It’s worth reading in its entirety.

The board was established in early 2022, modeled in spirit after the National Transportation Safety Board. This is their third report.

Here are a few news articles.

EDITED TO ADD (4/15): Adam Shostack has some good commentary.

Posted on April 9, 2024 at 9:56 AM • View Comments

TikTok Editorial Analysis

TikTok seems to be skewing things in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. (This is a serious analysis, and the methodology looks sound.)

Conclusion: Substantial Differences in Hashtag Ratios Raise
Concerns about TikTok’s Impartiality

Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese Government. Future research should aim towards a more comprehensive analysis to determine the potential influence of TikTok on popular public narratives. This research should determine if and how TikTok might be utilized for furthering national/regional or international objectives of the Chinese Government.

EDITED TO ADD (1/13): Blog readers have complaints about the methodology.

Posted on January 2, 2024 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

China Hacked Japan’s Military Networks

The NSA discovered the intrusion in 2020—we don’t know how—and alerted the Japanese. The Washington Post has the story:

The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on—plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to three former senior U.S. officials, who were among a dozen current and former U.S. and Japanese officials interviewed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

[…]

The 2020 penetration was so disturbing that Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, and Matthew Pottinger, who was White House deputy national security adviser at the time, raced to Tokyo. They briefed the defense minister, who was so concerned that he arranged for them to alert the prime minister himself.

Beijing, they told the Japanese officials, had breached Tokyo’s defense networks, making it one of the most damaging hacks in that country’s modern history.

More analysis.

Posted on August 14, 2023 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Microsoft Signing Key Stolen by Chinese

A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase “negligent security practices” is being tossed about—and with good reason. Master signing keys are not supposed to be left around, waiting to be stolen.

Actually, two things went badly wrong here. The first is that Azure accepted an expired signing key, implying a vulnerability in whatever is supposed to check key validity. The second is that this key was supposed to remain in the the system’s Hardware Security Module—and not be in software. This implies a really serious breach of good security practice. The fact that Microsoft has not been forthcoming about the details of what happened tell me that the details are really bad.

I believe this all traces back to SolarWinds. In addition to Russia inserting malware into a SolarWinds update, China used a different SolarWinds vulnerability to break into networks. We know that Russia accessed Microsoft source code in that attack. I have heard from informed government officials that China used their SolarWinds vulnerability to break into Microsoft and access source code, including Azure’s.

I think we are grossly underestimating the long-term results of the SolarWinds attacks. That backdoored update was downloaded by over 14,000 networks worldwide. Organizations patched their networks, but not before Russia—and others—used the vulnerability to enter those networks. And once someone is in a network, it’s really hard to be sure that you’ve kicked them out.

Sophisticated threat actors are realizing that stealing source code of infrastructure providers, and then combing that code for vulnerabilities, is an excellent way to break into organizations who use those infrastructure providers. Attackers like Russia and China—and presumably the US as well—are prioritizing going after those providers.

News articles.

EDITED TO ADD: Commentary:

This is from Microsoft’s explanation. The China attackers “acquired an inactive MSA consumer signing key and used it to forge authentication tokens for Azure AD enterprise and MSA consumer to access OWA and Outlook.com. All MSA keys active prior to the incident—including the actor-acquired MSA signing key—have been invalidated. Azure AD keys were not impacted. Though the key was intended only for MSA accounts, a validation issue allowed this key to be trusted for signing Azure AD tokens. The actor was able to obtain new access tokens by presenting one previously issued from this API due to a design flaw. This flaw in the GetAccessTokenForResourceAPI has since been fixed to only accept tokens issued from Azure AD or MSA respectively. The actor used these tokens to retrieve mail messages from the OWA API.”

Posted on August 7, 2023 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Friday Squid Blogging: Peruvian Squid-Fishing Regulation Drives Chinese Fleets Away

A Peruvian oversight law has the opposite effect:

Peru in 2020 began requiring any foreign fishing boat entering its ports to use a vessel monitoring system allowing its activities to be tracked in real time 24 hours a day. The equipment, which tracks a vessel’s geographic position and fishing activity through a proprietary satellite communication system, sought to provide authorities with visibility into several hundred Chinese squid vessels that every year amass off the west coast of South America.

[…]

Instead of increasing oversight, the new Peruvian regulations appear to have driven Chinese ships away from the country’s ports—and kept crews made up of impoverished Filipinos and Indonesians at sea for longer periods, exposing them to abuse, according to new research published by Peruvian fishing consultancy Artisonal.

Two things to note here. One is that the Peruvian law was easy to hack, which China promptly did. The second is that no nation-state has the proper regulatory footprint to manage the world’s oceans. These are global issues, and need global solutions. Of course, our current society is terrible at global solutions—to anything.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Posted on May 19, 2023 at 5:06 PM • View Comments

Another Malware with Persistence

Here’s a piece of Chinese malware that infects SonicWall security appliances and survives firmware updates.

On Thursday, security firm Mandiant published a report that said threat actors with a suspected nexus to China were engaged in a campaign to maintain long-term persistence by running malware on unpatched SonicWall SMA appliances. The campaign was notable for the ability of the malware to remain on the devices even after its firmware received new firmware.

“The attackers put significant effort into the stability and persistence of their tooling,” Mandiant researchers Daniel Lee, Stephen Eckels, and Ben Read wrote. “This allows their access to the network to persist through firmware updates and maintain a foothold on the network through the SonicWall Device.”

To achieve this persistence, the malware checks for available firmware upgrades every 10 seconds. When an update becomes available, the malware copies the archived file for backup, unzips it, mounts it, and then copies the entire package of malicious files to it. The malware also adds a backdoor root user to the mounted file. Then, the malware rezips the file so it’s ready for installation.

“The technique is not especially sophisticated, but it does show considerable effort on the part of the attacker to understand the appliance update cycle, then develop and test a method for persistence,” the researchers wrote.

Posted on March 9, 2023 at 8:33 PM • View Comments

AIs as Computer Hackers

Hacker “Capture the Flag” has been a mainstay at hacker gatherings since the mid-1990s. It’s like the outdoor game, but played on computer networks. Teams of hackers defend their own computers while attacking other teams’. It’s a controlled setting for what computer hackers do in real life: finding and fixing vulnerabilities in their own systems and exploiting them in others’. It’s the software vulnerability lifecycle.

These days, dozens of teams from around the world compete in weekend-long marathon events held all over the world. People train for months. Winning is a big deal. If you’re into this sort of thing, it’s pretty much the most fun you can possibly have on the Internet without committing multiple felonies.

In 2016, DARPA ran a similarly styled event for artificial intelligence (AI). One hundred teams entered their systems into the Cyber Grand Challenge. After completing qualifying rounds, seven finalists competed at the DEFCON hacker convention in Las Vegas. The competition occurred in a specially designed test environment filled with custom software that had never been analyzed or tested. The AIs were given 10 hours to find vulnerabilities to exploit against the other AIs in the competition and to patch themselves against exploitation. A system called Mayhem, created by a team of Carnegie-Mellon computer security researchers, won. The researchers have since commercialized the technology, which is now busily defending networks for customers like the U.S. Department of Defense.

There was a traditional human–team capture-the-flag event at DEFCON that same year. Mayhem was invited to participate. It came in last overall, but it didn’t come in last in every category all of the time.

I figured it was only a matter of time. It would be the same story we’ve seen in so many other areas of AI: the games of chess and go, X-ray and disease diagnostics, writing fake news. AIs would improve every year because all of the core technologies are continually improving. Humans would largely stay the same because we remain humans even as our tools improve. Eventually, the AIs would routinely beat the humans. I guessed that it would take about a decade.

But now, five years later, I have no idea if that prediction is still on track. Inexplicably, DARPA never repeated the event. Research on the individual components of the software vulnerability lifecycle does continue. There’s an enormous amount of work being done on automatic vulnerability finding. Going through software code line by line is exactly the sort of tedious problem at which machine learning systems excel, if they can only be taught how to recognize a vulnerability. There is also work on automatic vulnerability exploitation and lots on automatic update and patching. Still, there is something uniquely powerful about a competition that puts all of the components together and tests them against others.

To see that in action, you have to go to China. Since 2017, China has held at least seven of these competitions—called Robot Hacking Games—many with multiple qualifying rounds. The first included one team each from the United States, Russia, and Ukraine. The rest have been Chinese only: teams from Chinese universities, teams from companies like Baidu and Tencent, teams from the military. Rules seem to vary. Sometimes human–AI hybrid teams compete.

Details of these events are few. They’re Chinese language only, which naturally limits what the West knows about them. I didn’t even know they existed until Dakota Cary, a research analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a Chinese speaker, wrote a report about them a few months ago. And they’re increasingly hosted by the People’s Liberation Army, which presumably controls how much detail becomes public.

Some things we can infer. In 2016, none of the Cyber Grand Challenge teams used modern machine learning techniques. Certainly most of the Robot Hacking Games entrants are using them today. And the competitions encourage collaboration as well as competition between the teams. Presumably that accelerates advances in the field.

None of this is to say that real robot hackers are poised to attack us today, but I wish I could predict with some certainty when that day will come. In 2018, I wrote about how AI could change the attack/defense balance in cybersecurity. I said that it is impossible to know which side would benefit more but predicted that the technologies would benefit the defense more, at least in the short term. I wrote: “Defense is currently in a worse position than offense precisely because of the human components. Present-day attacks pit the relative advantages of computers and humans against the relative weaknesses of computers and humans. Computers moving into what are traditionally human areas will rebalance that equation.”

Unfortunately, it’s the People’s Liberation Army and not DARPA that will be the first to learn if I am right or wrong and how soon it matters.

This essay originally appeared in the January/February 2022 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.

Posted on February 2, 2023 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.