This is pretty sobering, when you stop to think about it. You get an email from a colleague sitting ten feet away, you ask him if he just sent it – and when he says yes, you click on the attachment. And your machine is suddenly infected by a server that you rent ten thousand miles away in a friendly country. We wrote this up in a tech report on the ‘Snooping Dragon’ [1376]. After it came out, we had to deal for a while with attacks on our equipment, and heckling at conference talks by Chinese people who claimed we had no evidence to attribute the attacks to their government. Colleagues at the Open Net Initiative in Toronto followed through, and eventually found from analysis of the hacking tools' dashboard that the same espionage network had targeted 1,295 computers in 103 countries [1225] – ranging from the Indian embassy in Washington through Associated Press in New York to the ministries of foreign affairs in Thailand, Iran and Laos.
There followed a series of further reports of Chinese state hacking, from a complex dispute with Rio Tinto in 2009 over the price of iron ore and a hack of the Melbourne International Film festival in the same year when it showed a film about a Uighur leader [1902]. In 2011, the Chinese hacked the CIA's covert communications system, after the Iranians had traced it, and executed about 30 agents – though that did not become publicly known till later [578]. The first flashbulb moment was a leaked Pentagon report in 2013 that Chinese hackers had stolen some of the secrets of the F35 joint strike fighter, as well as a series of other weapon systems [1381]. Meanwhile China and Hong Kong were amounting for over 80% of all counterfeit goods seized at US ports. The Obama administration vowed to make investigations and prosecutions in the theft of trade secrets a top priority, and the following year five members of the People's Liberation Army were indicted in absentia.
The White House felt compelled to act once more after the June 2015 news that the Chinese had hacked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), getting access to highly personal data on 22 million current and former federal employees, ranging from fingerprints to sensitive information from security clearance interviews. Staff applying for Top Secret clearances are ordered to divulge all information that could be used to blackmail them, from teenage drug use to closeted gay relationships. All sexual partners in the past five years have to be declared for a normal Top Secret clearance; for a Strap clearance (to deal with signals intelligence material) the candidate even has to report any foreigners they meet regularly at their church. So this leak affected more than just 22 million people. Officially, this invasive data collection is to mitigate the risk that intelligence agency staff can be blackmailed. (Cynics supposed it was also so that whistleblowers could be discredited.) Whatever the motives, putting all such information in one place was beyond stupid; it was a real ‘database of ruin’. For the Chinese to get all the compromising information on every American with a sensitive government job was jaw-dropping. (Britain screwed up too; in 2008, a navy officer lost a laptop containing the personal data of 600,000 people who had joined the Royal Navy, or tried to [1074].) At a summit in September that year, Presidents Obama and Xi agreed to refrain from computer-enabled theft of intellectual property for commercial gain8. Nothing was said in public though about military secrets – or the sex lives of federal agents.
The Chinese attacks of the 2000s used smart people plus simple tools; the attacks on the Tibetans used Russian crimeware as the remote access Trojans. The state also co-opted groups of ‘patriotic hackers’, or perhaps used them for deniability; some analysts noted waves of naïve attacks on western firms that were correlated with Chinese university terms, and wondered whether students had been tasked to hack as coursework. The UK police and security service warned UK firms in 2007. By 2009, multiple Chinese probes had been reported on US electricity firms, and by 2010, Chinese spear-phishing attacks had been reported on government targets in the USA, Poland and Belgium [1306]. As with the Tibetan attacks, these typically used crude tools and had such poor operational security that it was fairly clear where they came from.
By 2020 the attacks had become more sophisticated, with a series of advanced persistent threats (APTs) tracked by threat intelligence firms. A campaign to hack the phones of Uighurs involved multiple zero-day attacks, even on iPhones, that were delivered via compromised Uighur websites [395]; this targeted not only Uighurs in China but the diaspora too. China also conducts industrial and commercial espionage, and Western agencies claim they exploit managed service providers9. Another approach was attacking software supply chains; a Chinese group variously called Wicked Panda or Barium compromised software updates from computer maker Asus, a PC cleanup tool and a Korean remote management tool, as well as three popular computer games, getting its malware installed on millions of machines; rather than launching banking trojans or ransomware, it was then used for spying [811]. Just as in GCHQ's Operation Socialist, such indirect strategies give a way to scale attacks in territory where you're not the sovereign. And China was also playing the Socialist game: it came out in 2019 that someone had hacked at least ten western mobile phone companies over the previous seven years and exfiltrated call data records – and that the perpetrators appeared to be the APT10 gang, linked to the Chinese military [2021].
Since 2018 there has been a political row over whether Chinese firms should be permitted to sell routers and 5G network hardware in NATO countries, with the Trump administration blacklisting Huawei in May 2019. There had been a previous spat over another Chinese firm, ZTE; in 2018 GCHQ warned that ZTE equipment “would present risk to UK national security that could not be mitigated effectively or practicably” [1477]10. President Trump banned ZTE for breaking sanctions on North Korea and Iran, but relented and allowed its equipment back in the USA subject to security controls11.
The security controls route had been tried with Huawei, which set up a centre in Oxfordshire in 2010 where GCHQ could study its software as a condition of the company's being allowed to sell in the UK. While the analysts did not find any backdoors, their 2019 report surfaced some scathing criticisms of Huawei's software engineering practices [933]. Huawei had copied a lot of code, couldn't patch what they didn't understand, and no progress was being made in tackling many problems despite years of promises. There was an unmanageable number of versions of OpenSSL, including versions that had known vulnerabilities and that were not supported: 70 full copies of 4 different OpenSSL versions, and 304 partial copies of 14 versions. Not only could the Chinese hack the Huawei systems; so could anybody. Their equipment had been excluded for some years from UK backbone routers and from systems used for wiretapping. The UK demanded “sustained evidence of improvement across multiple versions and multiple product ranges” before it will put any more trust in it. A number of countries, including Australia and New Zealand, then banned Huawei equipment outright, and in 2019 Canada arrested Huawei's CFO (who is also its founder's daughter) following a US request to extradite her for conspiring to defraud global banks about Huawei's relationship with a company operating in Iran. China retaliated by arresting two Canadians, one a diplomat on leave, on spurious espionage charges, and by sentencing two others to death on drugs charges. The USA hit back with a ban on US suppliers selling chips, software or support to Huawei. The UK banned the purchase of their telecomms equipment from the end of 2020 and said it would remove it from UK networks by 2027. Meanwhile, China is helping many less developed countries modernise their networks, and this access may help them rival the Five Eyes' scope in due course. Trade policy, industrial policy and cyber-defence strategy have become intertwined in a new Cold War.
Strategically, the question may not be just whether China could use Huawei routers to wiretap other countries at scale, so much as whether they could use it in time of tension to launch DDoS attacks that would break the Internet by subverting BGP routing. I discuss this in more detail in the section 21.2.1. For years, China's doctrine of ‘Peaceful Rise’ meant avoiding conflict with other major powers until they're strong enough. The overall posture is one of largely defensive information warfare, combining pervasive surveillance at home, a walled-garden domestic Internet that is better defended against cyber-attack than anyone else's, plus