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Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
- marshf 7y agoThe full report can be found here in pdf form: https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/wp-content/brochures/reports/huge-fan-of-your-work-intelligence-report.pdf https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/wp-content/brochures/r...
- knolax 7y ago"Forward" lmao.
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoYeah, with all the effort CrowdStrike took to divide and preface each section of the doc, mark footnotes, and all the formatting junk....it's a very visually "noisy" document, and I really don't want to read it. Whatever happened to double-spacing? Simply godawful UX.
- monocasa 7y agoThey're padding the document heavily is why. That's also why they have a whole section on "we spent time tracking down the Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS's buildings", with the conclusion that they're the buildings with "Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS" written in big letters on the side.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoHah! And to think, their client could have paid $50k for this report that I and a few undergrads could hammer out in a Thursday evening after some yerba mate.
- monocasa 7y agoLol, well to be fair I know I do some of my best work on Thursday evenings with a good mate buzz going. : P
- Thorrez 7y agoAnd of course forward vs foreword.
- hummel 7y agoHere we go again
- chingdong 7y agoI make Airplane, but in China.
- zeristor 7y agoDid they steal MCAS from Boeing?
- nicoburns 7y agoI would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here. Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed. It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive. And it surprises me little that an economy which functions on very different principles also takes a very different attitude to knowledge sharing. Even if we don't wish to emulate this way of doing things entirely, perhaps we all have something to learn from this difference in perspective.
- stupidcar 7y agoBy "different principles", you presumably mean totally in the service of an autocratic, hegemonistic nation bent on the brutal oppression its own citizens and its rise to become an unchallengeable global power able to curtail the social, political and human rights of anybody, anywhere on Earth, who it deems an enemy?
- SkyMarshal 7y ago>... curtail the social, political and human rights of anybody, anywhere on Earth. FTFY. CCP’s objective here isn’t limited to enemies only.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y agoThese sorts of comments are what make most online discussions about China seem so out of touch. If I told you that most people in China generally support the government and don't feel oppressed by it, how would that affect your worldview? Most people in China are primarily concerned with improving their standard of living. For hundreds of millions of people, that standard has improved more than you can probably imagine in the last 30 or so years. That's what they care about. Sure, they get upset when they hear about governmental corruption, or when wages aren't paid, and young people even care about internet censorship (though they all have VPNs). But if you were to go to them and propose overthrowing the government, most people would be horrified. They don't want chaos. They think that would put the enormous gains in social welfare they've achieved at risk. They want a competent government that delivers economic growth, and maybe some day in the future slowly - gradually - opens up political life.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoAh yes, the Comac C919, 8 years late and counting, and brought to you by the company whose sole previous model still has trouble landing on wet runways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21
- ucha 7y agoChina managed to quite quickly absorb the technology transfer from Alstom/Siemens to build high-speed trains. Now their trains are better than anyone else's and they have more high-speed rails than any other country. They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina... I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.
- wolco 7y agoBut will China be able to make the next leap on their own? It's one thing to copy but another to come up with the design on the first place.
- kwizzt 7y agoYou shouldn't treat China as a single entity. The question should be whether the Chinese people can come up with the design.
- choonway 7y agoYou know, I have nothing against China building things from scratch on their own. I'm sure there are engineers in China who disdain all these espionage efforts and want to do their own original works, but are forced to "make use" of the information.
- blunte 7y agoGiven time, resources, and education, certainly Chinese people can come up with functional solutions to any problem. The same is true for people of practically any other country. But it seems that for one reason or other, technology theft is attractive enough to be a primary method of "innovating" in some places. It's really a matter of degrees. People copy anything they see that seems like a good idea (better than the idea they previously had). It's just a matter of how much original effort is put in vs how much detail from the other party's effort is acquired and used to fast-track the development. In complex projects like this, just seeing provides limited benefit. But in other simpler cases, just see another's working model can convey enough information for the newcomer to quickly come up to speed and compete.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoChina is powerful.
- ggm 7y agoPersonally, I think we'd have all been better served by the IPR being available on some RAND basis. There is a reason Buran looked like the Shuttle, which goes beyond spying.
- fsloth 7y agoOften problem constraints shape form, but Buran is maybe not such a great example of this. Buran looked like shuttle because the program was told to copy the US program to my knowledge.
- president 7y ago> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives. I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so many industries.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoLol come on. You know what will happen. You just don’t want to say it out loud. Edit: To be clear.... less Chinese will be allowed into the United States given the threat. Light the comments up my lads.
- president 7y agoInternment like in WW2? Probably not. Pretty sure the only viable way would be to enact laws to enforce extremely stringent eligibility requirements on foreign students/workers.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago> Internment like in WW2? Probably not. I wasn't thinking in such drastically illegal terms to be candid... so: no. > Pretty sure the only viable way would be to enact laws to enforce extremely stringent eligibility requirements on foreign students/workers. I agree in principle. My thoughts are more along the lines of mass denials of any type of visa from [mainland] China for the purposes of study and/or work. If it gets bad enough, total denial of all visas. (I don't feel a kinship with China that I do with Mexico/Latin-America and Canada.) This is a long term threat. I don't want any short term reactionary type policy. I want a strategic policy that addresses the threat, not just our emotions in the current times. Edit: Lol the Chinese are out in force tonight.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago> I agree in principle. My thoughts are more along the lines of mass denials of any type of visa from [mainland] China for the purposes of study and/or work. If it gets bad enough, total denial of all visas. (I don't feel a kinship with China that I do with Mexico/Latin-America and Canada.) No, that's dumb. The answer is to let the students in, maybe push them away from militarily sensitive areas of research, and improve the education they receive in the US to counter CCP propaganda narratives. If the later is done, maybe we can actually realize the hopes of someday liberalizing China. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/world/asia/hong-kong-protests-education-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/world/asia/hong-kong-prot...
- luba02 7y agoAs expected. But from reading the article I think the current plane probably had very little IP theft in the final design. Just your usual clusterfuck of inexperience and poor management. What they’re after ultimately is the ability to replace foreign components in future planes. Software, Hardware, the whole lot. Along with stealing all the management processes for systems integration. So in this sense, the hacking might have shaved a few years off their efforts.
- choonway 7y agoI wonder how much of their hacking efforts have yielded information that is 'salted'. Misinformation that will set them back years.
- jay_kyburz 7y agoI wonder how salting your own data could set an organisation back. A risky strategy I would say.
- choonway 7y agoNot your own data - you know there is a spy, and NSA helps you to isolate him and feed him salted info.
- erentz 7y agoUnfortunately all Chinese citizens must comply under Chinese law with spying requests whenever their intelligence agencies come asking. That makes every Chinese citizen in your company a potential spy. This is shitty on so many levels, and what is the appropriate response? Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities? Etc. That would be a terrible outcome. We do need some kind of clear asylum option for any Chinese citizen who gets pressured into this. But that only goes so far when the state back home can punish your family members etc.
- blunte 7y ago> Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities? If they can be compelled to act as spies by their government, then Yes, they should have restricted access. It is unfair to an honest person to be judged by the actions of a few in power in their country, but such is life globally (even for US citizens... especially lately).
- fyfy18 7y agoRather than being compelled, what happens if the citizen is voluntarily spying for their government? And maybe it's not even their government, maybe their brother in law is an exec for a competitor back home, so they want to help him out. And rather than being Chinese, maybe the citizen is French. https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espionage-economy-germany-russia-china-business https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...
- boredishBoi 7y agoWhat if their brother in law is an exec at an American competitor? I don’t see how your example is relevant given we’re discussing governments spying/compelling citizens to spy for them.
- bigwavedave 7y agoExactly. That's wildly different from being tempted to help out an in-law and conflating the two is disingenuous at best.
- john_minsk 7y agoJust for the sake of the argument: would US allow China to buy a controlling stake in Boeing?
- xxpor 7y agoAbsolutely not. Regardless of the commercial side, Boeing makes too many military jets for that to happen.
- john_minsk 7y agoI mean, for all fairness, one side is using non-market arguments to disallow acquisition, another side uses non-market ways to get access to this technology. Am I allowed to make such statement?
- starpilot 7y agoWith everyone hacking each other, maybe countries should just openly share IP and avoid the expense/troubles of cyber espionage. The end result is the same.
- fsloth 7y ago40% of US company export revenues come from IP. Not gonna happen. https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/the-state-american-intellectual-property-protecting-american-jobs https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/the-state-am...
- fsloth 7y agoThese are the statistics that would be referred to by IP proponents should this discussion ever reach a legislative stage. Don't shoot the messenger. Think about counter arguments.
- pinkfoot 7y agoI don't have a horse in this fight, but if I was on COMAC's risk committee I would also make sure that no foreign president could ever cut my company - and its enormous investment - off from critical supplies with no more than a stroke of a pen. Especially since that is what just happened to another Chinese company with Western suppliers. Its not a moral problem.
- leric 7y agomaybe this is connected to the shutdown of wooyun.org
- tzfld 7y agoNo wonder the US doesn't want the Chinese to be involved in large scale international tech projects like the ISS.
- known 7y agoA better comparison is with China’s state-led expansion abroad. While it lacks the EIC’s habit of violence, modern China shares both its strategic ambition and its commercial veneer. Asia is still grappling with that awkward mix, four centuries after the EIC’s motley crew sailed from the foggy Thames https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/10/10/the-astonishing-and-violent-rise-of-the-east-india-company https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/10/10/the-asto...