PRC Targeting of Commercial Telecommunications Infrastructure

Whenever I see these news & FBI releases about Chinese state-sponsored hackers breaching systems in America, I wonder whether the same thing happens over there: American malware and hacker groups attacking & laying landmines in China's internet infrastructure, although the Chinese may not publicize these exploits because their system opts to maintain an air of invincibility.

China has the Great Firewall segregating most international access from the country's network. Additionally, China (moreso than most) has a motivation to onshore as much of their software and hardware manufacturing to bolster their own industry.

It's possible that isolated attacks could pop off now and again, but hacking to-and-from China is strictly state controlled.

Their censorship infrastructure isn't security. If anything, it's another thing to hack.

It certainly does happen. See for example under “Targets”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations

You say it like it's hard to get around the Great Firewall in either direction.

I think its kind of hard to imagine its not totally complementary in this respect.

Even just being rational, if we have no qualms spying on our European allies, it seems a safe bet to assume we would be doing that and much more to China too.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57302806

Now if that naming isn't intentional then I don't know what would be ...

    The Tao or Dao is the natural way of the universe, primarily as conceived in East Asian philosophy and religion. This seeing of life cannot be grasped as a concept. Rather, it is seen through actual living experience of one's everyday being. The concept is represented by the Chinese character 道, which has meanings including 'way', 'path', 'road', and sometimes 'doctrine' or 'principle'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao

Considering how deeply infiltrated German intelligence services were/are by Russia, it's hard to feel bad about spying on them.

At least the Dutch are competent.

At least you have CIA openly recruit spies on Twitter: https://x.com/CIA/status/1841468925378171381 I think only CIA and mossad have the confidence to do it this way.

Yes, the US famously has breached foreign infrastructure. In Confessions of an Economic Hitman[0], Josh Perkins discusses how he knows on good authority the US could shutdown the Japanese electrical grid with relative ease if needed, which an ally. Imagine what they do to perceived enemies.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2159.Confessions_of_an_E...

This book was on of my favorite books to site in extemporaneous speaking events.

According to Chinese state media, the US installed malware in systems in Chinese universities tied with military, e.g. Northwestern Polytechnical University

It does have some defensive benefit. Getting legitimate connectivity to work reliably across the Chinese border, is a big pain. Due to this, Chinese commercial internet infrastructure has very few dependencies on international services.

Western infrastructure by comparison is very vulnerable to distribution of connectivity, attacks on deep sea cables can cause a lot of damage.

Confessions is best read as historical fiction. It's brilliantly written. But the author has never been able to substantiate much [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...

That's wild.

What's the situation like on the ground? I've read that the CCP sentences spies to death and that they catch a lot of them.

According to Chinese state media, Chinese state media is never wrong

True, but I would also deny most of those accusations even if true If I was the State Department. If I was the US state department. I personally know a McKensey Principal who's government work isn't that far off of what Perkins describes. and they love bragging about it too.

Believe it or not, it's up to you; the same goes with FBI

Yeah based on that video, it'd be easy to edit the onion address and send them to a honey pot...

The US could do a great many things to Japan with relative ease, given their (relatively) enormous military presence in the country.

The accusations also seem unsubstantiated and ideological in nature. Eg

> Mallaby said that Perkins' conception of international finance is "largely a dream" and that his "basic contentions are flat wrong" because "the poor don't always lose" when developing countries borrow money.

It's not exactly an uncommon take to center conceptions neocolonialism around the World Bank and the IMF. This just seems like a Steven Pinker blunt rotation picking on the work.

The FBI is not the same as a news agency however.

So that point is null.

In the last episode of the risky business podcast they chatted about the "GoblinRAT" based on this Russian analysis/post-mortem:

https://rt-solar.ru/solar-4rays/blog/4861/

Likely an attack done by US intelligence.

There has been quite a few of these with a lot of details released by Russian techies - this is just the latest one I know of.

Both depend on whether you believe in the government actually. When we say "Chinese state media", we're really talking about a media controlled by the government, especially for those political topics

This would be true even with private actors, at the end of the day it's whoever has concrete evidence of something taking place.

If the FBI is going to make the broad statement that China is hacking the USA, it'll have to back that statement up by evidence presented in court against individuals the FBI has investigated for hacking into US companies/government orgs.

The US famously compromised the Greek phone switches a while back, which were written in Erlang and thus so was the malware (correction--it was actually the proprietary predecessor to Erland, called PLEX). An telecom employee died under mysterious circumstances in the aftermath and the US Embassy in Athens was found to have close ties to the individuals involved; a CIA employee was later charged and fled back to the US. All in a days work for the "leaders of the free world."

Wasn't it that the Greek govt allowed the NSA in to monitor the Olympics but they overstayed their welcome?

Seems that you just don't believe the other side has done some investigation and therefore did not search for it. I'm not saying that either incident is fake but you've just proved my point of view.

Belgacom, Diginotar, Stuxnet Anything involving Fox-IT. Just to mention three cases involving black mailed ministers and involving corrupt intelligence public servants. The Dutch are not competent, they are corrupt as hell. Access to anything Dutch is for sale and on bulk discount.

You are correct that we choose what to believe based on what we think is more likely or useful. We don't have time to research all the things

But that is not relevant to point that Chinese state media (which is in a way all their media, like becoming in Russia now) is wrong and lies regularly but will never undermine the cult of personality at the top of the government that owns it by admitting the lies.

To deny that you need to go all tinfoil on me and say most instances where they lied is made up by the West. Like idk Tiananmen didn't happen or whatever. If you believe that then sure.

FBI have admitted it was wrong in a number of high profile cases, so no, FBI is not always right according to FBI.

I don't doubt CCP has sentenced a lot of people to death for spying for US, but I wonder how many of these were actual spies and how many where there just to fill a quota and earn a promotion. Communist regimes are not famous for having respect for their citizens well-being, fair and just justice system, or checks and balances which limit government overreach, especially for intelligence agencies.

They were invited to provide some kind of assistance, but I can't imagine they were given the green light to upload arbitrary code into the countrywide telephone exchange without notifying the Greeks at all, or providing a copy of it.

It's not just that they added Greek officials phones to the monitoring list alongside legitimate suspects, but the whole program itself was hidden. Nor is it clear how the US could have forwarded any legitimate threats captured without admitting the whole program.

The whole Olympics rationale is a bit weird too. Yes, it is a big event and there have been a few terrorist attacks in its history, but relatively few considering its huge scale. Also, almost every state actor is participating and thus unlikely to cause any major trouble. It's a big propaganda thing for most of the US-order enemies. It doesn't really make sense why the NSA would have been authorized such extensive access, to the exclusion of the host country's own personnel, instead of requesting help from neighboring EU countries that already presumably cooperate on law enforcement.

That sounds like a cover story the US made up to change it from "act of war" level to "oops we forgot to ask if this was okay."

I don't believe any side who doesn't present in a good evidence based way, in other words verifiable and or replicable data.

On that front China has a far worse track record and institutions that uses evidence based truth telling.