Ep 8: Living Off The Land
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What is 'living off the land' in cyber hacking?
It's 2020. We start spotting Chinese hackers tucked deep inside our infrastructure, quiet, patient, just waiting. The industry calls this living off the land, but don't let that rustic name fool you. These hacks are far from harmless. They're sleeper cells waiting for marching orders. We just didn't know what exactly. Here's Kevin Mandia.
And all of a sudden we see Chinese threat groups since about late 2020, at least from my observables, hack in and we don't know why, because they're not the tank through the cornfield. They're hacking in and just, that's it. There's no other activity. And then you're like, why are they there? And it's maybe they have access later. Maybe it's to mine user IDs and passphrases. There's no better way to compromise any organization then you can just log in, period. It's the best way to breach an organization is log into it the same way the employees do. There's just no evidence. And that's what living off the land means. There's no malicious code. There's no backdoor. There's good operational security. If they created a log file that's suspicious, they would edit it.
When they wanted to go surreptitious, they were good at it. And that's the thing about digital evidence. You can edit it or delete it. You can change it. It's different than the physical world. You can do some wonderful things if you're on offense and you have the patience and time and skill to do it.
By this point, you almost certainly understand the CCP absolutely has the patience, time, and skill. But in theory, so do we. So how did we let it get this far? How did we allow China's hackers to so intimately invade our most critical infrastructure? I'm Nicole Prolorath, and this is To Catch a Thief. The answer to that question of how we let things get this out of hand is where a number of trends converge. I've walked you through China's hacking advancements and the creeping emergency of global supply chains. But what made this the perfect storm was our uniquely American blind spots. for one despite the impression left by snowden the nsa and other u.s intelligence agencies aren't actually in your private networks watching what you do or in this case what chinese hackers are doing not without running straight into the fourth amendment the nsa is a foreign intelligence agency It hunts for threats abroad.
Its charter doesn't allow it to hunt for hackers on private American networks, not without a warrant or a special court order. And what you need to understand is that the vast majority of U.S. critical infrastructure — pipelines, the power grid, water, hospitals — more than 80% of it is in private sector hands. meaning the government has no visibility into it. They can't deflect attacks on those private systems or even hunt there unless they've got a court order or they're invited in. To a large degree, when it comes to these living off the land attacks, we're flying blind. Our second big gaping vulnerability is that the United States is among the most digitally dependent nations on earth.
We've been baking technology, code into everything with security as little more than an afterthought. We let software eat the world. And we did it with this, quote unquote, move fast and break things approach, as Mark Zuckerberg coined Facebook's motto in its early days. The idea was just get the application, get the code, get the router to market, and we can worry about the bugs and security issues later. What this means, in effect, is that we've been plugging vulnerable software and hardware into our infrastructure with little, if any, security baked in by default. And then we leave it to these businesses and critical infrastructure operators like Nick Lawler and Littleton to figure out the security piece on the backend. The people who designed routers never thought that one day they'd be the linchpin for advanced nation-state attacks.
And China has been using all of this to its advantage because by 2020, most Americans had grown somewhat wise to China's ways. If an IT operator picked up some unnerving traffic coming from a Chinese server, they knew to look into it. But Volt Typhoon, these Chinese infrastructure hackers, they weren't breaking in from Chinese servers anymore.
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