Ep 6: The Gunslingers
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What happened during China's cyber-hiatus?
For 18 months, a fragile calm descended on our digital borders. The CCP's hackers seemed to have just hung up their hats. And for a time, that giant whooshing noise of American IP being sucked back to China just stopped. All was quiet on the Eastern Front. Or so we thought.
In retrospect, it appears the PRC carefully studied the Snowden documents, got a look at the NSA's signals intelligence, and asked, how do we get that? Within months of the first leaks, Xi set up a standing cyber committee, one of a handful of committees that operates at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. Looking back now, it seems he charged it with mirroring and innovating upon the way the U.S. conducts its cyber operations. During its digital ceasefire, the PRC was actually busy consolidating disparate PLA hacking units under a new strategic support force, very similar to the Pentagon's own Cyber Command.
How did the CCP restructure its hacking operations?
It moved responsibility for the country's most sensitive operations away from the smash-and-grab PLA to the stealthier and far more strategic Ministry of State Security, or MSS. Think of the MSS as a sort of combination of the FBI and NSA. It conducts espionage at home and abroad. But unlike the NSA, the MSS outsourced its sensitive operations to elite Chinese hackers all over the country.
What does the Ministry of State Security do?
It set up front companies that usually marketed themselves as cybersecurity firms. But in reality, their only job was to carry out clandestine attacks for the MSS. In other cases, they paid or forcefully encouraged individual gunslingers, think top engineers at China's most successful tech companies or students at its universities, to hack the world's most valuable targets. This infusion of new blood, new talent into the hacking pool meant more than just a shift in the chain of command. It meant a radical advance in skill and tactics. I'm Nicole Perleroth, and this is To Catch a Thief. These hackers were no longer blasting into the building and announcing their presence. Here's John Holquist, Mandiant's chief analyst.
They are now far more focused on their operational security, laying low, making it much more harder for us to attribute them.
Before 2015, attributing Chinese APTs by their attack style, whether phishing tactics or their malware, was a fairly straightforward practice. Rarely would you see a Chinese APT deploy advanced techniques or custom code. They barely tried to hide their tracks. By late 2016, it was a different story. Here's Kevin Mandia.
We used to be able to bucketize the forensics, Nicole, into very few groups out of China. And then all of a sudden we get an explosion. That's really it. Where the forensic evidence of each intrusion doesn't feel related to any other intrusion, or it's just different enough that we're like, ah, we're not quite sure if it's the same people. There's just a dramatic increase in the volume of change, the pace of change on offense.
How did Chinese hackers evolve their tactics after 2015?
The first sign the game had changed is when I started getting tips about a spate of Chinese intrusions at aviation and aerospace companies in late 2016. Hackers weren't coming in the usual ways anymore. Instead of hacking their targets head-on, they were slipping in through a side door. They'd hacked the service providers that companies hire to manage their backend IT systems. In industry parlance, these companies are known as MSPs, managed service providers. Breach one, and you get entry to potentially thousands of their customers. Some of these MSPs had names you've never heard of, but others, like IBM, you would definitely know. And the Chinese hackers doing this, they weren't one group working from one drab PLA building anymore.
This was a coordinated surge by disparate elite hackers. And unlike the PLA, these hackers weren't getting paid by the hour. They were getting paid by the outcome. Incident responders started getting frantic calls from MSPs all over the world seeking help. And these weren't just in the US. These were MSPs in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, all across Europe, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Australia.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What happened during China's cyber-hiatus?
0:08–1:27
2
How did the CCP restructure its hacking operations?
1:27–2:00
3
What does the Ministry of State Security do?
2:00–4:02
4
How did Chinese hackers evolve their tactics after 2015?
4:02–6:25
5
What is Operation Cloud Hopper?
6:25–13:58
6
What are zero-day exploits and why are they valuable?
13:58–18:11
7
How did the CCP acquire zero-day exploits?
18:11–25:19
8
What challenges do hackers face in China?
25:19–32:54