Information Warfare Monitor » GhostNet

E-mail Accounts of Foreign Journalists in China Hacked

sahar — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 06:54:35 +0000

Source: Sumner Lemon, PC World.

The e-mail accounts of eight foreign journalists working in China and Taiwan were hacked recently, leading Yahoo to suspend several of the accounts last week, the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China (FCCC) said Wednesday.

“We have confirmed eight cases in which journalists in China and Taiwan have had their e-mail accounts hacked in recent weeks, with several accounts disabled by Yahoo on March 25,” the FCCC said in an e-mail sent to members.

Among the hacked e-mail accounts, the settings of one account were also modified to forward all e-mails to another e-mail address, it said.

“Yahoo has not answered the FCCC’s questions about the attacks, nor has it told individual mail users how the accounts were accessed. Password security and malware are ongoing concerns, but it’s unclear whether they are related to this case,” the group said.

The FCCC warned members to change their e-mail passwords and advised them to use other means of communication for arranging interviews or other “sensitive business.”

Yahoo was not immediately available to comment.

While there is no evidence linking the hacked e-mail accounts and the Chinese government, the FCCC warning highlights growing concern over the e-mail surveillance of individuals generally viewed with suspicion by the Chinese government, including human rights activists and foreign journalists working in China.

Earlier this month, foreign journalists in China were the target of a sophisticated e-mail malware attack. E-mails in that attack appeared to originate from the Shanghai World Expo press office and contained a malicious PDF attachment. The attack seemed to target foreign journalists registered to cover the Expo, which opens on May 1.

In addition, a sophisticated attack from China that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in December led Google to close down a censored version of its search engine in China, redirecting users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong instead.

Circumstantial evidence also implicated China in a computer spying network, dubbed GhostNet, that touched users in 103 countries and was used to transfer data to servers in China. The network was discovered in 2009 after researchers were asked to examine computers in offices of the Dalai Lama in India, the U.S. and the U.K. The computers that comprised GhostNet are believed to have been infected by malware in e-mail attachments sent to specific individuals.

The Dalai Lama is viewed with deep suspicion by the Chinese government, which accuses him of working for Tibetan independence.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/192990/email_accounts_of_foreign_journalists_in_china_hacked.html

Palantir Night Live: Nart Villeneuve

nvilleneuve — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:13:45 +0000

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 from 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM (ET) | Mclean, VA

Event Details:

Join us for the inaugural Palantir Night Live (PNL) forum with Nart Villeneuve, Chief Security Officer for the Secdev Group, who will discuss some of his experiences as a lead technical investigator on GhostNet, the Chinese cyberspying ring that most notably hacked into the Dalai Lama’s account (read the New York Times article for more details), as well as a variety of other cyber investigations.

Attendance is limited, in order to allow for an open forum conducive to discussion.

Registration is first come, first served. Food and refreshments will be available.

Please email questions/comments to: pnl@palantirtech.com

March 23rd, 5:30-7:30pm EST
Palantir Technologies
1660 International Drive
Suite 800
McLean, VA 22102

Read about Sergey Brin’s GhostNet talk at the 2010 TED conference.

India’s cyber-defenses full of holes

gwalton — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:41:33 +0000

Source: Indrajit Basu | Asia Times

KOLKATA – It’s reminiscent of an action movie. The year is 2017 and two rival countries – India and China – are fighting a war. The conflict is not being fought with guns, tanks and aircraft but computers, bots, viruses and Trojans. The soldiers are not troops, but hackers.

The scenario was enacted by the Indian military last year in a cyber-warfare simulation called the “Divine Matrix”. Officially, the likelihood of a Chinese cyber-strike has since been played down. This is a big mistake, experts say, given the poor state of India’s cyber-security.

A recent investigation by McAfee, the software security firm, revealed that as cyber-attacks rise globally, India is emerging as

an easy hunting ground.

Worse, the vulnerability not only poses a threat to the government, military, and infrastructure, it also carries a huge risk for international businesses that have outsourced IT operations or bought software in India.

“That India is under-prepared is well known, and experts often raise concerns about how the government’s IT systems could be crippled in a war,” said Shivarama Krishnan, an IT security expert at a firm of global consultants. “While that threat is valid, I think the real worry is someone attacking the IT systems of the private sector.”

Krishna added that India could be used as a route to attack the IT systems of other countries, since it is linked to important networks like the United States’ financial sector. “Cyber-criminals could take advantage of the vulnerability in the IT security systems here and cripple financial services there,” he said.

India’s US$60 billion software industry derives over 85% of its revenues from abroad. The US’s financial services, retail, manufacturing, infrastructure (like electricity and telecoms) as well as medical services account for 60% of these export revenues.

Across the world more critical infrastructure is being connected to the Internet, leaving it more vulnerable, says McAfee, with India having the lowest rate of security measures for its infrastructure. India also topped McAfee’s charts for malicious traffic in Asia.

Although China last year cut its security budgets by 40% for government-sponsored cyber-security cooperation among operators of critical infrastructure, it still had the highest rate of participation, said McAfee.

The firm painted a detailed picture of how countries are defending their critical networks in the report, “In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyberwar”.

The report said as data is increasingly stored online, security is increasing in sophistication. However, hackers and cyber-criminals are still managing to stay a step ahead.

India in particular faces more frequent cyber-attacks. For instance, in 2009, more than 6,000 websites were hacked and defaced, compared to 1,752 in 2006.

Greg Walton, one of the researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto that created a sensation last year by discovering the existence of GhostNet, a global cyber-spy network that allegedly originated in China, said India was particularly vulnerable.

“If you look at the statistics of the institutions or the targets that were attacked by GhostNet when it attacked global systems, India was by far the hardest hit by that operation,” he said. “India is a software superpower yet for some reason the country can’t seem to get its cyber-security act together.”

Legally, India is also seen as an easy target. “The Indian IT act and related local laws are oriented towards primarily addressing fraud and copyright violations; they are not security oriented,” said Gurmeet Kanwal, founder-director of The Center for Land Warfare Studies, an autonomous think-tank on strategic studies and warfare.

The other major issue is cost. Indian is touted as a low-cost outsourcing destination and “security is always an expensive proposition”, said Desai of MitKat, a consultancy firm. “Often Indian service providers cannot adopt security measures that on a par with international standards.”

India can ill-afford to ignore this new challenge to its security, say Kanwal. He says information warfare can start anywhere and carry on silently in peace time, comparing it to “acupuncture warfare” a term that refers to seeking out a country’s weak points.
India should adopt an inter-ministerial approach to dealing with the emerging threat, according to Kanwal. A special agency should be formed to spearhead India’s cyber-war efforts, and the country should have its own national cyber-security adviser, he maintains.
“But above all”, said Walton, “even if government and specific security agencies are wake up to the threats of information warfare, the country’s corporate sector is still oblivious. It is time that this sector wakes up too.”

Indrajit Basu is a correspondent for Asia Times Online based in Kolkata.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

@nartv: The Aurora Mess

gwalton — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:36:37 +0000

Source: The Aurora Mess | Nart Villeneuve

Tags: Aurora, Botnets, China, Google, Malware.

The data about Aurora has always felt just a little off for me. Maybe its that everyone writing about it just has their own piece of the puzzle to analyse, without the detail required to accurately link the pieces together.

When it comes to the command and control infrastructure, maybe it’s that some obfuscated the domain names while others published them, but with a domain on the blog post that’s not in technical write up. Maybe it is that some have significantly bigger lists than others (that include duplicates as well as the root domain for a dynamic dns provider that hands out sub-domains).

Maybe it is that some name domains that hosted the exploit but do not provide details on C&C’s that compromised hosts check-in with. Maybe the difference between the long lists and short lists is that some are including “copycats” — sites that host the IE exploit. Since “Aurora” is now being used to refer to the specific attack on Google, the 0day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (that was apparently used), and the malware that was apparently dropped by the exploit (Hydraq) interchangeably it is difficult to get a handle on exactly what is what.

Google says the attacks were “highly sophisticated and targeted” (as does McAfee, Mandiant, and iDefense) while Damballa says that it was the work of amateurs, Dancho Danchev says that “[i]t’s in fact [an] average team” and Mikko Hypponen says “[t]his wasn’t in my opinion ground-breaking as an attack. We see this fairly regularly.” OK, well, that’s quite the continuum of “sophistication.” Back to that in a bit.

Attribution? The New York Times reported that the attacks were traced to two schools in China: Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School. While some have drawn links between these schools and the Chinese military others cast doubt on it. The Financial Times reportsthat “a freelance security consultant in his 30s” in China wrote (part of) the Internet Explorer exploit but “is not a full-time government worker, did not launch the attack, and in fact would prefer not be used in such offensive efforts.” Hmm. OK. Mandiant indicated that the quality of the exploit points toward some kind of relationship with the Chinese state, while iDefense, looking at the command and control infrastructure, pretty unambiguously states that the Chinese State was being the attacks whether or not “amateurs” were used.

So here we are at the crossroads of the exploit, the malware, and the command and control infrastructure. And as Richard Bejtlich points out there’s more to it than just the technical aspects of malware, there is, as Mike Cloppert describes, a range of indicators that allow one to characterize the adversary behind the attacks. Clearly, most of us relying on public sources do not have a sufficient level of detailed information to analyse the attack on Google with such depth.

This brings me back to the Damballa report. I really liked this report because is focused on the command and control infrastructure, it was based on interesting data collected via passive DNS data collection and included many interesting conclusion and enough detail to begin connecting their data with other publicly available data. In fact, one of the most interesting observations for me was evidence that the DNS resolutions indicate that Google China was compromised first, followed by Google in Mountain View some 17 hours later. Still, there are parts of the report that are confusing to me.

The Damballa report starts by looking at “five CnC domain names associated with the Aurora botnet” that were publicly disclosed, however, these domain names are not explicitly stated in the report. The most seemingly authoritative list, from Symantec, for example, lists 7 domains. The starting point appears to be “blog1.servebeer.com”. This one is common to all lists (except Symantec’s technical write-up). The domain servebeer.com is a Dymanic DNS serverice offered by No-IP that allows people to register sub-domains such as “blog1.” Based on factors such as “DDNS credentials” Damballa linked the following domains together (four of which are not disclosed).

CnC_Domain.1
CnC_Domain.2
CnC_Domain.3
CnC_Domain.4
blog1.servebeer.com

At some point each of the 5 domains above pointed at at least one of the “IP addresses associated with two of the CnC servers used during the Aurora attack.” The IP’s were not disclosed. Therefore, I am not entirely sure of how the next group of domain names are linked.

baltika1.servebeer.com
m7been.zapto.org
miecros.info
mcsmc.org
yahoo.blogdns.net
filoups.info
google.homeunix.com

While the last 2 domains (filoups.info and google.homeunix.com) appear on the US CERT list of “Aurora” domains, the first 5 domains (baltika1.servebeer.com, m7been.zapto.org, miecros.info, mcsmc.org, and yahoo.blogdns.net) do not.

Damballa then links this second group to “two distinct families of Fake AV Alert / Scareware: Login Software 2009 and Microsoft Antispyware Services.”

Fake AV Alert / Scareware
mcsmc.org
micronetsys.org
mnprfix.cn
filoups.info
miecros.info

Fake Microsoft Antispyware
ec2-79-125-21-42.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ip-173-201-21-161.ip.secureserver.net
inekoncuba.inekon.co.cu
google.homeunix.com
yahoo.blogdns.net
voanews.ath.cx
ymail.ath.cx

So, filoups.info links the “Fake AV Alert / Scareware” to the US CERT list of “Aurora” domains and google.homeunix.com links the “Fake Microsoft Antispyware” to the US CERT list of “Aurora” domains. Both appear in Damballa’s second cluster (which has an unclear relationship with the first cluster).

Using the Damballa list along with samples from ThreatExpert I compiled a list that included a few additional domain names. I included domain names that the individual piece of malware requested that had similar paths to those identiofied by Damballa and excluded those that appeared to be other malware or SEO URLs.

For example, one sample contains google.homeunix.com, yahoo.blogdns.net, tyuqwer.blogdns.com, and tyuqwer.dyndns.org. The domains google.homeunix.com and tyuqwer.dyndns.org appear on the US CERT list, yahoo.blogdns.net appears on the Damballa list and tyuqwer.blogdns.com appears on neither. Another sample contains google.homeunix.com tyuqwer.dyndns.org blogspot.blogsite.org and voanews.ath.cx. All of these domains appear on the US CERT list google.homeunix.com and voanews.ath.cx appear on the Damballa list.

The next grouping largely focuses on “mcsmc.org” abnd the domain names that apear with it and request similar URL paths but are not in the Damballa report.

virtualmits.com
syswa.cn
thcway.info
searchnix.info
wscntgy.com
google-analitics.in
licagreem.in
jusched.in

The relationships between the domains can be built our further, especially if we include common IP addresses. I think this indicates that there are a variety of conclusion being drawn based on data that comes bundled with a variety of assumptions. For example, is the sample detailed by Symatec the same — as opposed to similar to — the one used in attack on Google? How were these “master” lists — such as the one by US CERT created? How were these domains bundled together?

In the Damballa report in particular there are a few additional assumptions that I am not entirely sure of. First, I’m not sure that DDNS == amateur. Many of the targeted attack on civil society and human rights groups I’ve looked at used DDNS. And while many DDNS providers do cooperate with the security industry and law enforcement, the ones in China (like 3322.org) don’t. Moreover, I’m not sure that “amateur” necessarily excludes state involvement — even governments can engage in behaviour that would be considered amateurish. And would you want to tip off state involvement by being uber3l33t? The logic just starts to become circular after a while, especially if you only focus on the technical aspects.

I mean, if we take Google at their word and believe that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists” how do we explain the connection to (probably Eastern European) SEO and related common malware?

Even if we assume that the “master” list is accurate, Damballa does raise some alternative explanations for the association between the two:

* it is possible that two different groups purchased the services of the same crimeware group (probably the same people behind Operation Aurora) to distribute and manage their malware family. Or the crimeware group rented out different variants of the same malware to different groups with different intentions.
* There is no natural progression seen between the two families. Usually malware writers evolve in both technology and protection of their creation but these two families did not show any related evolution. The malware families appear to exist independently, and then become superseded by Trojan.Hydraq.

The relationship between crimeware — or common botnet operators/kits — and targeted malware attacks in order to extract sensitive data (some might call this espionage) is something I tried to explore in “The “Kneber” Botnet, Spear Phishing Attacks and Crimeware.” Again, given the lack of precise data I don’t claim to know what’s going on in the Google case — in fact, I may have just made it worse with this post. But if we accepts the links that Damballa has found to be accurate it does raise the important issue of the relationship between crimeware and espionage.

But, maybe, we’re jumping to conclusions based on faulty assumptions. I just don’t know. It is still a mess.

Report: The Command Structure of the Aurora Botnet: History, Patterns, and Findings

gwalton — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:24:45 +0000

The major pattern of attacks previously identified as occurring in mid-December2009 targeting Google appear to originate in July 2009 from mainland China.

Hosts compromised with Aurora botnet agents and rallied to the botnet Command-and-Control (CnC) channels were distributed across multiple countries before the public disclosure of Aurora, with the top five countries being the United States, China, Germany, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

Damballa identified additional botnet CnC domains used by these criminal operators and established a timeline of malware associations back to May 2nd, 2009 by tracking the evolution of the malware used by Aurora’s operators

This botnet has a simple command topology and makes extensive use of Dynamic DNS (DDNS) CnC techniques. The construction of the botnet would be classed as “old-school”, and is rarely used by professional botnet criminal operators any more. Reliance upon DDNS CnC is typically associated with new and amateur botnet operators

The criminals behind the Google attack appear to have built and managed a number of separate botnets and run a series of targeted attack campaigns in parallel. This conclusion is based upon CnC domain registration and management information. The earliest of the CnC domains associated with these botnets, reliant upon DDNS service provisioning, appear to have been registered on July 13th 2009

The botnet operators behind the Aurora attacks deployed other malware families prior to the key Trojan.Hydraq release. Some of these releases overlapped with each other. Two additional families of malware (and their evolutionary variants) were identified as “Fake AV Alert /Scareware – Login Software 2009” and “Fake Microsoft Antispyware Service,” both of which employed fake antivirus infection messages to socially engineer victims into installing malicious botnet agents.

How Chinese hacked Google, and why India should worry

gwalton — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:12:04 +0000

Source: Claude Arpi, Rediff

The recent announcement by the United States giant search engine Google that it might withdraw from China made the headlines in world media. The Google decision highlighted the aggressiveness of the Chinese hackers who had been penetrating cyber fortresses like the Pentagon or the White House (as well as the PMO or the MEA in India!).

Claude Arpi spoke to Shishir Nagaraja, the co-author (with Ross Anderson) of The Snooping Dragon: Social malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement, published by University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in March 2009.

Shishir Nagaraja, currently associated with the Information Trust Institute of the University of Illinois (US), tells rediff.com, not only about the Google episode, but also his experience with the Office of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala and the world of hackers, in general.

He believes that we have only seen the beginnings of the cyberwar, the ‘war of tomorrow’. In the not-too-distant future, it will affect each one of us.

What according to you has happened with Google in China?

From what I could gather, they targetted some people connected to the Tibetan movement and some mainland activists.

The second aspect is that the infrastructure used by Google to carry out censorship in China was a part of the attack. Not very much has been made public by Google in this regard, so we can’t be very sure.

Third, Google itself was a victim and they claim to have lost intellectual property. What we know for sure is that the email accounts of the Tibetan activists were read regularly from IP addresses in China.

What is new in these attacks? One reads that they were highly sophisticated?

No, it is the same old story. Nothing is new. It is the same thing that we wrote about [The Snooping Dragon report] or Greg Walton wrote about [Tracking GhostNet report]. Same thing!

The only new thing is that they have targetted Gmail addresses, but this was known to us. In fact, I had approached Google in September [2008] after the Office of the Dalai Lama’s Representative in New York had got in touch with me; they had found out that somebody had maliciously configured their SMTP [outgoing mail] server so that it would forward all their emails to a certain Google account.

It is interesting because a lot of space is needed for this and Google has that space. Isn’t it better to use something already available?

The Dalai Lama’s Office [in New York] found out that even that [Google account] space had overflowed; they had not removed the wiretrap and the forwarded mail started bouncing from Google. It is then that they realised what was going on.

When I was approached, I advised them to talk to Google. Later, on their behalf, I informally talked to the person in Google responsible for investigating malicious activity. He said, ‘You can put a formal complaint if you want, but there is not much that we can do.’ This is the response that I got.

Some 30 other companies are said to have been attacked at the same time.

Yes, we had projected [such attacks] in our report. In fact, the theft of Google’s IP is exactly the sort of attack we warned against. We had said that more and more people will use tactics pioneered by the ‘Chinese hackers’. The attack this time is not different; the attack vector is the same, ‘abuse of social trust’.

The [attackers] make your emails look like from someone you trust, not from a stranger. This is done by replaying past messages with minor modifications, and I expect the attackers will mature to the point of using victim input in real time to construct attack emails: for instance, by embedding malware into an attachment even as the victim composes a message.

Now for that part about why Google is behaving like this [threatening to withdraw]? There are no new technical reasons for doing so. There might be business reasons though. It is a tough market. They don’t have a large share in China compared to their competitors.

This could be a face saving excuse or a bargain striking maneuver, I don’t know.

Ultimately, to threaten to withdraw is good for their image?

It is favourable to their image. There is a lot of anti-China sentiment in the West. [Google's decision] plays into this, while giving them a good reason to withdraw, though I am not sure that they really want to withdraw, because political censorship climate has remained unchanged in China.

Ten/fifteen years ago, when they came to China, the Chinese government told them the same thing: you have to censor the Web. Today, Google says: ‘We are negotiating with the Chinese government. We don’t want to censor the Web!’ The reasons stated now to leave the market were valid even when they entered the market.

Playing in a capitalist world, Google knew the rules of the game, and they were willing to play by it as long as they turned a profit. It was the same then, it has not changed, formally or informally.

Since 1989, the Chinese government is clear about their policy of censorship.

Could you tell us your experience with the Office of the His Holiness the Dalai Lama (OHHDL). Tell us about Snooping Dragon? It seems to have been interesting in the sense that you found an organisation willing to be openly studied, which not the case for governments, banks, Army, etc.

Yes, it is not usual, though since 2004 there have been some cases documented through Congressional hearings. In contrast, by agreeing to make the findings public, the Buddhists have shown themselves to be truly enlightened.

Though, from a political perspective, agreeing to make the subject public made a lot of sense [for them]. In the diplomatic battle between China and Tibet, the latter has always sought to portray an image of a victim set against an aggressive Chinese position.

It played [in favour] of their PR image. However, banks, governments and companies seek an image of ‘nothing is wrong with our security’. But this is a rational explanation. I don’t think His Holiness invited us with this in mind.

When we were invited to have a look, the OHHDL was not aware of the extent of damage being caused by the attacks much less being in a position to perform accurate diplomatic calculations.

It was quite bad?

Oh, yes, it was bad. Their electronic infrastructure was completely compromised. The bad news is that this attack can also be carried out on any usable computing infrastructure with very few exceptions, very few people believed in this assertion when our report came out, but the successful attacks on Google vindicate our position.

Could, for example, the attackers have known the position of the Dalai Lama’s team before they went to Beijing for talks?

Very much possible if their position [for talks] was prepared and recorded on the computers. These days, the OHHDL is fairly tech savvy and use email and electronic storage for almost all their activities.

The Chinese stole detailed meeting notes, plans for school construction, basically any data sitting on an OHHDL computer was lifted. One of the most important was the refugee database.

It means all the registration details of all the Tibetans refugees who had fled to India.

The sys-admins took it offline as soon he realised that the attack was going on. Regarding the sys-admins, I have a lot of respect for the decisions they took. They took the right decisions and the level of response with speed and accuracy would be in line with the best trained sys-admins.

It is quite commendable really. They found a problem, and they asked experts for help immediately without trying to hide the problem or hoping it would go away. . . they wanted to find out. They found the best experts to help them. Usually the IT security culture of most organisations is to hide mistakes.

The sort of openness that the OHHDL has in matters of general policy as well in the management of their computer security is very commendable.

It is because of this culture [of openness] that they were able to discover the extent of surveillance going on. And for these reasons, we are much more aware of Chinese info-warfare capability.

To what extent the security holes have been closed, I am not sure. I don’t think they have been closed. They are very much there and the attacks might be repeatable; it is a tough problem to solve.

If embassies or government offices can be attacked, one can presume that it is easier to penetrate relatively smaller office like the Dalai Lama’s?

Yes, you are right. Similarly, if Google can be attacked, then most companies can be successfully targetted as well.

A news item mentioned that Tibetans would have stolen data from the Chinese, particularly the laptop of a lady-member of the United Front Works Department, the Chinese ministry dealing with the Dalai Lama’s Envoys. Are you aware of this?

I don’t know. I have not heard about this.

There is always the question of what constitutes proof in a computer security investigation. In the case of the OHHDL, the evidence I have used during the investigation, wasn’t the IP address of the control server or similar information.

The main evidence comes from the fact that the Chinese foreign ministry used some of the intelligence information gathered from electronic surveillance and used it to apply diplomatic pressure on those invited to meet with the Dalai Lama.

When the Chinese foreign ministry showed full knowledge of OHHDL emails — this constitutes strong evidence in my eyes — it showed that there was Chinese government involvement at some level, although they might not have carried out the attack themselves.

The ownership of the attack is squarely with the Chinese government even if they might have ‘outsourced’ the attack to Chinese cyber-guerrillas.

In our report, we provided additional explanation on why we chose to point fingers at the Chinese government. We also considered other theories: who else could have been motivated to carry out this attack and why and if they had done it, what would be the evidence.

We have seen strong evidence of Chinese government involvement, and none to the contrary.

The media has recently dealt at great length on the so-called independent hackers and the role of the Chinese State.

In my mind, it is a little bit like guerilla warfare; a much sought-after alternative to conventional forces. Guerilla warfare provides plausible deniability to the sponsoring State. If you consider US-Iraq, US-Afghanistan, Pakistan-India or Israel-Palestine conflicts, we often see a model of ‘guerilla warfare’ playing out. It appears that such a model of warfare is gaining popularity.

If the quality of the fighters is very good on the ‘open market’, why not hire them instead of training your own and risking bad press.

Don’t you think that China has this type of mindset to use these tactics while it is not present in India?

Well, there are documented cases of India’s intelligence agencies using the underworld (Dawood versus Chhota Rajan, for example). But these are home affairs and have little to do with other countries.

In comparison, the Chinese use of guerrilla hacker networks is quite popular. Timothy Thomas has documented this quite well [it is referenced in the Snooping Dragon report].

The Chinese attacks on the OHHDL appear to have been carried out by semi-skilled amateurs. From the quality of the work, I can say that it was not a very skilled person, not a real expert. If they had experts on hand, then the situation would have really been different in terms of difficulty analysis.

This points to two things: one: analysis will get tougher in future as attacks get more sophisticated, and, second, if amateurs can carry out successful attacks on Google and OHHDL, then that signals a very real danger.

About Chinese ‘experts’: do you believe that many of them have been trained in the US or the West and later returned to China?

Possibly! But there is no need for a good hacker to be trained in the US. People with good computer skills are very much there in countries like India, Pakistan or China. Some very, very skilled people might not even have had elementary education.

The Chinese recently closed a ‘hacking’ school in Hebei province. Is it eyewash, or will it make a difference?

[These days] there are loads of resources online, so closing one school won’t make a difference for the same reason that closing a terror school hasn’t made a difference.

If someone wants to learn, it does not take much effort. It is important to understand that the main innovation is not technological, it is a psychological one. The entire computer industry has progressed technologically, but computer security is not a technology issue.

Technologies are fine, they are there. The question is the human link. The way humans interact with computer security is poorly understood by software engineers.

The current technology does not consider humans as they are: humans are fitted into a user model of how they are ‘supposed’ to be. Each time there is a security problem, security experts are quick to point to the user’s fault! The user did not do this or that! This mindset has to change.

Technology needs to understand and accept user behaviour and provide security assurances with this in mind. We should accept people as they are, accept the diversity in human behaviour, there is no point in writing manuals and designing secure systems for somebody else.

The users are not going to do change, so user education is the wrong place to spend security budget.

In their White Paper of Defence, the Chinese strategy has undergone a shift from ‘active defense’, (never attacking someone first, but being ready to respond if attacked) to ‘active offense’. Don’t you think that a nation practicing this will always be a step ahead of its opponent?

As usual, computer security is quite asymmetric. It takes less to attack than to defend. You have only to find one hole to be successful in attack, while defence has to plug all the holes.

For this reason, it appears that attacking is easier than defending, computer systems or physical world security.

Recently, an article in the Indian Press affirmed that the National Technical Research Organisation which deals with cyber attacks in the government pretends that their Rapid Action Group can tackle an attack in less than 90 minutes. What are your views on this?

Assuming they mean ‘any’ intrusion, it is highly, highly unlikely to be true. If it was true, it would be a five-star research contribution, probably worth a Nobel Prize.

Instead, if they are claiming that the exact same attack would be detectable that’s straight forward but close to useless in defending against future attacks (they won’t be the same as past attacks).

Attacks don’t repeat the same way. . . why should they? They always evolve. To prove that nobody can steal an organisation’s data, you have to prove that every hole has been closed.

[However] there are not just bugs in software; there are also bugs in human operation. For example the attack on the OHHDL was not due to a computer bug, the software defects were there, but they were incidental to the attacks.

When humans authenticate emails, they do so based on socio-cognitive signals based on the text of the email. It is a highly sophisticated pattern analysis-based authentication mechanism that is used by humans.

The attackers found a way to beat it by simply replaying the text. In this type of an attack, detectability is very low. If the attacker decides to intrude and stay around your network, it might take a couple of years before he/she is detected, [he can remain dormant].

In the case of the OHHDL, they were probably there for a year or so. The attackers were detected, because they increased the frequency of attacks way too much. They made two mistakes: one they replayed emails too many times, and second, they showed that they knew some information that they could have not known without spying.

But the attackers will learn and the second generation of social malware attacks will be more covert. Will we detect them? Unlikely! In half an hour? Very, very unlikely!

When the Pentagon or the White House have been penetrated [in the past], it took [sometimes] years to find out. They are ways to remain covert, attack covertly (no replays), transmit covertly (using covert channels/’96 there are lots of them).

Presence of attacks on OHHDL could be found out [relatively easily]. But if they deployed covert communication over the Internet to transfer stolen information, then they can remain virtually undetectable for a very long time.

Recently, DefExpo India 2010 was held in Delhi. The Indian government is planning to spend Rs 50,000 crore (Rs 500 billion) in military hardware, don’t you think that it is not the ‘war of yesterday’?

Oh, yes! Absolutely! What you mentioned is conventional warfare. Now we are speaking of guerilla warfare. A significant national security risk to India lies in the area of computer security which can’t be addressed with Sukhois.

With the increasing reliance on computer networks, India’s information infrastructure is growing rapidly. The budget for computer security has to increase too.

There is a very real risk that China has control over significant parts of the government’s computer infrastructure. Military capability will mean little if the enemy has high quality intelligence.

Supremacy in information security is crucial, for economic security reasons too. For example, how to protect IP from India’s software industry from being stolen? Social malware can be used to steal software.

Another example involves injecting false data into accounting systems. Each company has an accounting system which is automated using computers. Social malware can be used to infect a majority of the computers of an accounting system.

With banks having a hard time coping with 1 per cent of customer machines being infected, how can a company run an accounting system with 50 per cent of its machines being compromised?

The scale of such economic fraud could run into hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is increasing, even as we speak.

We all need security against social malware attacks. Political organisations could be hit and have their political secrets revealed. Consumers and business organisations will be hit by accounting frauds.

In today’s economic climate, such frauds might be enough to put small companies out of business. Today, even for a small company, you can’t do your accounts manually. . . if a malware introduced false transaction amounts of Rs 10,000 or Rs 15,000, this won’t even be noticed until it is too late and money has been siphoned off using Western Union.

If the behaviour of banks in the case of ATM frauds is anything to go by, then banks will simply dump the liability on the end users saying ‘it is your fault; the malware was in your computer.’

The negative fallout will always have to be taken by the customers who do not have the means to defend themselves. I foresee that we will witness new instances of social malware attacks, targetting businesses and individuals in the near future.

Tell us something about your project in India

I will move to India shortly. I will take a position of Assistant Professor at the IIIT Delhi and, with a group of three colleagues, will start a Security Group conducting research and teaching in computer security.

We have a Master’s and a PhD programme. My first priority will be to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the scale of computer crime in India. Today, this research is carried out by people from outside [India].

To carry out defensive actions, we have to know the scale of exposure to [computer piracy]. What we did for the OHHDL, we will do for various companies and governmental organisations. It means high level audits. It is a lot of work. All the information is scattered today, it may take a while to get the data, analyse it, publish the results and take remedial measures.

The government can’t do everything, but it can start programmes to improve computer security for the public.

Dalai Lama provokes foreign media to challenge China

gwalton — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:11:50 +0000

According to a report February 24 by the Global Times, AFP and other news agencies reported a day ago that the Dalai Lama deliberately claimed that he may no longer be “reincarnated” in order to prevent the Chinese government from “designating” a boy with the Dalai Lama’s reincarnated soul.

The Dalai Lama also expressed strong support for Google, and said that the Chinese government cannot stop western media from popularizing “democracy” in China.

According to a report from AFP, the Dalai Lama said February 22 in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) that he is willing to terminate the reincarnation institution in order to prevent the Chinese government from announcing the emergence of a new Dalai Lama through finding a boy with his reincarnated soul.

He also claimed in regards to the issue of a reincarnated soul boy, that the Chinese government is “more concerned with this institution than me.”

Aside from the succession issue, the Dalai Lama also used Google tussle to provoke U.S. media agencies to continue their confrontations against China.

According to a Reuters report February 22, the Dalai Lama said while delivering a speech in Los Angeles that it is unnecessary for Google to feel depressed from the difficulties it encountered earlier in China. He believes that under the joint efforts of western countries and the “exiled Tibetan government,” Google will surely restart its development in China.

Hu Yan, professor at the Central Party School said in an interview with Global Times that this was not the first time the Dalai Lama expressed remarks on reincarnation and he has aired various types of opinions through western media, such as that he might choose his reincarnation when alive; and his reincarnation could be a female.

Canada Should Lead Global Effort to Counter Internet Censorship and Cyber-Espionage in China and Elsewhere, New CIC Paper Argues

gwalton — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:02:27 +0000

Dr. Deibert’s paper argues that Canada should:

(1) Take a leadership position in promoting a global, multilateral agenda around arms control in cyberspace. The present state-based cyber security agenda is almost entirely absent of voices or forums dedicated to creating norms of mutual restraint, confidence building and information sharing.

(2) Take a more active interest in the role played by Canadian companies which support China’s vast censorship and surveillance regime.

(3) Lead by example in domestic policy areas, including addressing loose laws on wiretaps, ambiguous oversight of intelligence agencies, shoddy content filtering mechanisms around access to pornography and hate speech, questionable deep packet inspection and data retention practices by internet service providers, and other areas in which Canadian practices provide justification for China’s own domestic censorship and surveillance regime.

Dr. Ronald Deibert is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. China’s Cyberspace Control Strategy: An Overview and Consideration of Issues for Canadian Policy is part of the CIC’s 2010 China Paper series.

For more information on China’s Cyberspace Control Strategy: An Overview and Consideration of Issues for Canadian Policy or the CIC, please visit: www.canadianinternationalcouncil.org.

The Canadian International Council (CIC) is a non-partisan, nationwide council established to strengthen Canada’s role and capacity in international affairs, which builds on the proud histories of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies. The CIC aims to advance research, discussion and debate on international issues by fostering a Canadian foreign policy network that crosses academic disciplines, policy areas, and economic sectors. CIC’s research program is managed by the national office in Toronto. The CIC’s 15 branches across Canada present a variety of activities to CIC members, including speakers programs, conferences and seminars, and study groups.

Contacts:
MEDIA CONTACT:
Media Profile
Susan Reisler
416 342-1843
susan.reisler@mediaprofile.com

Sergey Brin on Google’s China decision

gwalton — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:27:34 +0000

Video transcript. Refer to TED’s site.

CA: In the way that this has been described, there’s suspicion cast that this is actually work authorized by the Chinese government. Did you have, apart from an assumption about motivation, did you have any actual evidence as to who was behind it?

SB: I don’t actually think the question of whether this was the Chinese government or not is all that important. I know that seems strange. The Chinese government has tens of millions of people in it, and if you look at the associated army and whatnot it’s even larger. It’s larger than most countries by far. So even if there were a Chinese government agent behind this, it might represent a fragment of policy, as it were. There are many people there, and they have different views.

If you look at when we entered China with our Chinese operation in 2006, I actually feel like things really improved in the subsequent years. And I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding it, when we had to self-censor a fair amount, but we were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less. We from the outside provided notification when the local laws prevented us from showing information, and the local competitors followed suit in that respect. So I feel like our entry made a big difference. But things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics. And there’s been a lot more blocking going on since then. Also our other sites, YouTube and whatnot, have been blocked. And so the situation really took a turn for the worse.

CA: Since that incident, have you now stopped self-censoring results in China, or is it just a statement of intent and you’re involved in negotiation now?

SB: We have made a statement of intent that we intend to stop censoring, and if we can do that within the confines of Chinese law and policy, we’d love to continue Google.cn and all of our operations there. And if we cannot, then we’ll do as much as we can, but we don’t want to run a service that’s politically censored. We’re not talking about porn and gambling, things like that, but really the political stuff.

CA: You’re willing to self-censor the porn and stuff that might be culturally inappropriate?

SB: I think there’s a range of things, and the US also has a set of laws about the variety of kinds of content.

CA: There’s probably some people here who wouldn’t mind you doing that in the US as well. (Laughs) But look, you’ve got a mission to bring information to the world, the light of information. You know, there’s hundreds of millions of people in China on the web. I mean, they’re going to feel completely abandoned — aren’t they? — if you leave?

SB: Well, once again, look: I’m an optimist. I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information. So, I think a lot of people think I’m naive, and that may well be true, but I wouldn’t have started a search engine in 1998 if I wasn’t naive in that way.

(Laughter)

CA: So, what’s your guess?

(Applause)

CA: I mean, do you think that there’s a real chance the negotiations may be successful, and you find a working relationship and a way of staying?

SB: I mean, I’m not going to put odds on it. I’m always optimistic, and it’s not always … and perhaps we won’t succeed immediately, tomorrow or not, but we will in a year or two.

CA: You know, when this story broke, you got huge credit for, from a lot of people from around the world for your saying this is part of “Don’t be evil.” I mean, there’s a familiar tale out there of young idealists who start something; they really believe in it, they put their ideals on public display: “We’re going to hold to the true way.” And then as a … You become a giant global corporation, all these shareholders and demands on you. You’re inevitably forced to compromise. I mean, really? “Don’t be evil”? Can you really hold onto that? Does it mean anything now?

SB: Perhaps people don’t believe this, but all throughout the discussion of originally entering China in 2006 as we did, and the announcement last month, our focus has really been what’s best for the Chinese people. It’s not been about our particular revenue or profit or whatnot. And I think there are many potential answers there. And it’s really a difficult question. But …

CA: What do you hold inside, Sergey. You know, you’re a multi-billionaire. Doesn’t at some point all the opportunities for you kind of tug away at some of that young, naive idealism?

SB: Look, I hope not. I do think that often companies end up being short-sighted with respect to their decisions, and perhaps they’re motivated by the next particular earnings and whatnot. In particular, actually, as we’ve gone though this investigation, it turns out that a number of companies were aware of certain attacks on their systems, and yet they didn’t come forward, and as a result other companies couldn’t be better prepared. Now, I should give a lot of credit. Some companies have, and I would point you for example to Northrop Grumman, that had a significant intrusion where the details of the … terabytes of data about the F-35 fighter were stolen. That’s recently … That’s public, and that’s in congressional reports and was actually very useful to our investigation. If more companies were to come forward with respect to these sorts of security incidents and issues, I think we would all be safer.

CA: All right, Sergey. So, look: Thank you for Google. Thank you for all you’ve done for TED over the years. I admire you wrestling with this issue. I wish you the wise and right outcome on it. Thank you so much.

SB: Thank you very much.

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5 minutes ago: For an alternate perspective on how Google can fulfill it’s mission while serving the interests of it’s shareholders I humbly submit the following observations:

Google stated it’s mission publicly: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. There’s no reference to financial aspiration in this statement. Investors have the right to expect Google to work toward the achievement of it’s stated mission. To compromise it’s mission for the sake of profit would be a breach of it’s responsibility to is shareholders.

The problem is that there’s an assumption that shareholders invested in Google exclusively for profit. I think this is almost entirely correct. If so, they invested in a firm who’s goals are not aligned with their own. As partial owners, they could potentially rally to realign their firms priorities, but that hasn’t happened. It seems to me that Google owes its shareholder an earnest pursuit of it’s stated goals.

India’s drill report ‘surprises’ Chinese govt

gwalton — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:06:19 +0000

Source: Li Xiaokun (China Daily)

Updated: 2009-04-01 07:44

China expressed surprise about reports India had planned a secret military exercise targeting Beijing, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday.

India’s Hindustan Times reported last week that the Indian army had on March 25 concluded a three-day military exercise codenamed Divine Matrix, based on the assumption a “nuclear-armed China will attack India before 2017″.

It said that before the exercise, the Indian military spent six months studying various hypothetical scenarios of war with Beijing and concluded: “China would rely on information warfare to bring India down on its knees before launching an offensive.”

It also quoted an officer as saying the People’s Liberation Army can now “launch an assault very quickly, without any warning”.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regular press briefing: “We are surprised by the report. Leaders of China and India had already reached consensus that the two countries will not pose a threat to each other but rather treat each other as partners.”

China is willing to work with India to boost relations over the long term, he said.

Espionage accusations

Qin also dismissed allegations yesterday that China was involved in worldwide computer espionage, accusing the report’s authors of being “possessed by the Cold War ghost”.

The Toronto-based Information Warfare Monitor report released on Saturday said that over the past two years, at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries were breached by software used for spying. It said the spy ring was mostly based in China but could not be definitively linked to the government.

Hacking targets included computers used by the Dalai Lama and his “government-in-exile”, the report said.

But the Canadian researchers admitted in the report that they are unsure of the identities or motivations of the hackers, adding that alternative explanations are possible.

“Nowadays, the problem is that there are some people abroad bent on fabricating lies about so-called Chinese computer espionage,” Qin said.

“Internationally, there’s a ghost called the Cold War and a virus called the China threat. People possessed by the Cold War ghost constantly spread this China threat virus.”

China pays great attention to computer network security, and resolutely opposes and fights any criminal activity harmful to computer networks, such as hacking, he said.

“These people’s attempts to vilify China through rumors will never succeed,” he said.

Hu-Sarkozy meeting

Qin said China is still waiting for France to address its grave concerns before President Hu Jintao and French President Nicolas Sarkozy could plan talks on the sidelines of the G20 summit scheduled to start tomorrow in London.

Such a meeting could help mend the countries’ bilateral ties, which soured after Sarkozy met with the Dalai Lama in Poland last year.