Information Warfare Monitor » Tibet

Cyberwar declared as China hunts for the West’s intelligence secrets

gwalton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:48:29 +0000

Source: Michael Evans, Giles Whittell, The Times:

Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China.

The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states.

Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players.

In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.

Sources at the Office for Cyber Security at the Cabinet Office in London, set up last year, said there were two forms of attack: those focusing on disrupting computer systems and others involving “fishing trips” for sensitive information. A special team has been set up at GCHQ, the government communications headquarters in Gloucestershire, to counter the growing cyber-threat affecting intelligence material. The team becomes operational this month.

British and American cyber defences are among the most sophisticated in the world, but “the EU is less competent”, James Lewis, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said. “The porousness of the European institutions makes them a good target for penetration. They are of interest to the Chinese on issues from arms sales and nuclear non-proliferation to Tibet and energy.”

The lack of routine intelligence sharing between the US and the EU also contributes to the vulnerability of European systems, another analyst said. “Because of Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with America our systems have to be up to their standards in a way that some of the European systems don’t,” he explained.

Jonathan Evans, Director-General of MI5, warned in 2007 that several states were actively involved in large-scale cyber-attacks. Although he did not specify which states were involved, security officials have indicated that China now poses the gravest threat. Beijing has denied making such attacks.

Robert Mueller, FBI Director, has warned that, in addition to the danger of foreign states making cyber-attacks, al-Qaeda could in the future pose a similar threat. In a speech to a security conference last week, Mr Mueller said terrorist groups had used the internet to recruit members and to plan attacks, but added: “Terrorists have \ shown a clear interest in pursuing hacking skills and they will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders with an eye towards combining physical attacks with cyber-attacks.”

He said that a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a “well-placed bomb”. Mr Mueller also accused “nation-state hackers” of seeking out US technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies.To help to fight the growing threat, the Office of Cyber Security, set up last year as part of the Government’s national security strategy, liaises with America’s so-called cyber czar, Howard Schmidt, who was appointed by President Obama to protect sensitive government computers.

British officials said that everyone in sensitive jobs had been warned to be especially cautious about disseminating intelligence and other classified information. Whether British intelligence is involved in retaliatory attacks is never confirmed. However, officials said that there was a significant difference between being part of an information war and indulging in aggressive attacks to disrupt another country’s computer systems.

Dr Lewis said that neither the US nor any of its Western allies had formed an effective response to the Chinese threat, which has its origins in a massive boost to Chinese technology ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, in 1986. The West’s own cyber offensives have so far been directed largely at terrorists rather than nation states, giving China virtually free rein to penetrate Western systems with its own world-class hackers and increasingly popular Chinese-made components. “You almost have to admire them,” Dr Lewis said. “They have been very consistent in their goals.”

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.

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.

Divine Matrix: Indian Army fears China attack by 2017

gwalton — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:35:33 +0000

Source: Rahul Singh, Hindustan Times

First Published: 00:04 IST(26/3/2009)
Last Updated: 01:52 IST(26/3/2009)

The Indian military fears a ‘Chinese aggression’ in less than a decade. A secret exercise, called ‘Divine Matrix’, by the army’s military operations directorate has visualised a war scenario with the nuclear-armed neighbour before 2017.

“A misadventure by China is very much within the realm of possibility with Beijing trying to position itself as the only power in the region. There will be no nuclear warfare but a short, swift war that could have menacing consequences for India,” said an army officer, who was part of the three-day war games that ended on Wednesday.

In the military’s assessment, based on a six-month study of various scenarios before the war games, China would rely on information warfare (IW) to bring India down on its knees before launching an offensive.

The war games saw generals raising concerns about the IW battalions of the People’s Liberation Army carrying out hacker attacks for military espionage, intelligence collection, paralysing communication systems, compromising airport security, inflicting damage on the banking system and disabling power grids. “We need to spend more on developing information warfare capability,” he said.

The war games dispelled the notion that China would take at least one season (one year) for a substantial military build-up across India’s northeastern frontiers. “The Tibetan infrastructure has been improved considerably. The PLA can now launch an assault very quickly, without any warning, the officer said.

The military believes that China would have swamped Tibet with sweeping demographic changes in the medium term. For the purposes of Divine Matrix, China would call Dalai Lama for rapprochement and neutralise him. The top brass also brainstormed over India’s options in case Pakistan joined the war to. Another apprehension was that Myanmar and Bangladesh would align with China in the future geostrategic environment.

The Gh0st in the Shell: Network Security in the Himalayas

gwalton — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:17:51 +0000

The Gh0st in the Shell [PDF]

Abstract

The town of Dharamsala in the Himalayas of India harbors not only the Tibetan government in-exile, but also a very unique Internet community operated by AirJaldi. The combination of high-proﬁle clientele and naive users makes for a very interesting setting from a network security standpoint. Using packet capture and network intrusion detection systems (NIDS), we analyze the security of the network. Given the sensitive history between China and Tibet, and the general public’s penchant to support the freedom of Tibet, it would not be surprising for the Chinese government to be interested in the activities of the community in-exile. Therefore, we also look for evidence of malware targeted at this unique user-base. In our work, we ﬁnd signiﬁcant amounts of malicious activity in the trafﬁc, including a solid link to a previously discovered high-proﬁle spy network operated in China.

Authors:

Matthias Vallentin vallentin@icir.org
Jon Whiteaker jbw@berkeley.edu
Yahel Ben-David yahel@airjaldi.net

China’s Human-Rights Hacking

gwalton — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:28:19 +0000

Whether China’s “cyber militias” are merely teenage hackers or are state-supported is uncertain. What’s for sure is that these are not randomly targeted Web sites. They include the Independent Chinese PEN Center and China Human Rights Defenders, which have been calling publicly for the release of Liu Xiaobo, the ICPC’s former president and the co-author of the democratic manifesto called Charter ’08. Similarly, the London-based International Tibet Support Network’s Web site has been down three times in the last two weeks.

China-based hackers have also targeted the State Department, the Naval War College, NASA and the World Bank in recent years. The so-called “Titan Rain” and “Ghostnet” cyber-espionage campaigns starting in 2003 involved hackers systematically infiltrating thousands of computer systems in hundreds of countries. While there’s no smoking gun, the Chinese military has heavily invested in equipping its cyber units, and there is a consensus in the U.S. defense community that the Chinese government at the very least tacitly supports thousands of hackers and cyberspace academics. Tibetan activist groups in particular have gotten used to cyber intrusions, which surged after unrest erupted in western China last March.

The hacking of the human-rights groups’ sites may not seem as threatening as, say, an attack on critical infrastructure. But the intent is just as dangerous: to intimidate and silence those who try to speak up for the Chinese people. Even more reason for the U.S. and other free nations to bolster their defenses.

Cyberwarfare: The Issue China Won’t Touch

gwalton — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:55:25 +0000

Mulvenon and other analysts say China employs a constantly shifting mix of official and civilian or semicivilian groups (such as so-called patriotic hacker associations) as the foot soldiers — the “proxies” — in its cyberwar armies. The technological challenges of tracing attacks on U.S. government and private-corporation computers are so enormous that Beijing can simply deny that any of the problems have originated in China. So far, the Chinese have been able to get away with it, despite the fact that not just the U.S. is complaining. In the past few years, sources ranging from the German Chancellor’s office to government mainframes as far afield as New Zealand and Belgium have made loud public allegations that they had been the subject of cyberinfiltration from China, all to no avail. (See a story about China’s alleged cyberattacks on the U.S.)

“The scope and scale of the attacks has not abated despite the international opprobrium and outcry,” Mulvenon says. “It’s a serious problem that at the moment we don’t have a solution to, because our inability to attribute the source of the attack fundamentally undermines our efforts at deterrence. If you can’t identify the attacker, you can’t deter them.”

That’s a troubling situation for China’s potential adversaries to find themselves in, particularly as, unlike in conventional military training, what China’s hackers are doing is the real thing, not make-believe. “The skill sets needed to penetrate a network for intelligence-gathering purposes in peacetime are the same skills necessary to penetrate that network for offensive action during wartime,” notes a recent congressional report on China’s alleged clandestine cyberattacks in the U.S. According to the report, released in October by the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, that means that “if Chinese operators are, indeed, responsible for even some of the current exploitation efforts targeting U.S. government and commercial networks, then they may have already demonstrated that they possess a mature and operationally proficient CNO [computer network operations, or cyberwarfare] capability.” (See a story about the invasion of Chinese cyberspies.)

But even if Obama had raised this tricky issue with his Chinese counterpart, it is unlikely that his efforts would have brought about any change. As the congressional report notes, the heavy emphasis on cyberwarfare is a key component in the Chinese military’s strategic vision for defeating the technologically superior U.S. in any future conflict. That means conducting so-called asymmetrical warfare, aimed at using the U.S.’s dependence on technology as a weapon: for example, targeting America’s network of space satellites or developing missiles that could sink U.S. aircraft carriers. For China’s generals, though, of all the asymmetrical methods of attack available to them, cyberwar presents a uniquely effective — and cost-effective — means of neutralizing the U.S advantage. “They recognized the importance as far back as the early ’90s,” says Mulvenon, “and they now have a major advantage, a weapon like no other that allows them to reach out and touch right into the continental United States.”