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20 years ago, china hide 2nd network card that was in listener mode, transmitting documents at random times, mostly peek. This was at a research company. How i
by JediPig 5y ago
20 years ago, china hide 2nd network card that was in listener mode, transmitting documents at random times, mostly peek. This was at a research company. How it was discovered. We put a card on listening/prem mode and mirror everything for that subnet the printer was on. I thought I screwed it up with the double mirror/traffic.
when investigating why the issue, we found nothing wrong with the config, only when we plugged it to another network, we discovered it was something on the network. We narrow it down quickly to the printer. We told head of security (we were hired for an audit ) and it soon became known it was stealing trade secrets and sending them overseas.
that was 20 years ago, and till this day, I remember anytime someone says china doesn't steal technology... I remember this printer. this was done at the state level and was caught.
- xibalba 5y ago> anytime someone says china doesn't steal technology Does anyone believe that any non-CCP actors are disputing China’s ongoing, massive, organized trade secret theft?
- DevKoala 5y agoI do. Highly effective propaganda has associated the facts around Chinese trade secret stealing with claims of racism and general xenophobia. As a result, now you have plenty of individuals all over the world whose moral compass pushes them to ignore the facts around trade secret stealing and even go dispute them in online conversations.
- QuarterReptile 5y agoExplain further, please. Your response doesn't answer the question; I can't decide if it's deliberate obfuscation through scary words or an complete misunderstanding of what is being asked.
- coupdejarnac 5y agoJust go on to reddit, and you'll find lots of people defending China against what they think is a smear campaign. Lots of these people appear to be young westerners who have bought into China's propaganda.
- aaronblohowiak 5y agoTo look beyond the rhetoric, we can see how smart rich people are acting in their self interest, (presumably the profit motive generally trumps identity politics) and there are very very numerous cases of avoiding ip leakage to PRC while being very comfortable with RoC, challenging the racial or xenophobic explanation in your post.
- spoonjim 5y agoChina is using the US’s Christian sensibilities (charity, forgiveness, etc) against them.
- throwaway59553 5y ago
- seneca 5y agoI don't know that it's Christian sensibilities so much as a political view extremely susceptible to this sort of shrewd manipulation. As the person you're responding to said, the smoke screen is to cast criticism of China as racist or xenophobic. They even have a term, "baizuo", to mock this concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baizuo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baizuo In general you're right though. They are very successful at using weaknesses against us.
- president 5y agoThis is true. Growing up in an immigrant community (and as a minority myself), I would always hear people mock how open and trusting Americans were and how Americans were easily cheated. Anything involving the honor code would usually be violated.
- rafale 5y agoWhy was the printer connected to the public internet? A DMZ subnet would have prevented this vector of attack.
- dookahku 5y agoThat doesn't feel like a reasonable response... How's anormal person supposed to know what DMZ subnet would means?
- josephcsible 5y agoA normal person wouldn't, but there should be someone on a company's IT staff who does.
- tablespoon 5y ago>> 20 years ago, china hide 2nd network card that was in listener mode, transmitting documents at random times, mostly peek. This was at a research company. > Why was the printer connected to the public internet? A DMZ subnet would have prevented this vector of attack. Aren't most network printers connected to office networks with public internet access? I sounds like this printer was making outgoing connections, and I doubt many people/companies go through the trouble of specially blocking those from printers. You'd have to be especially security conscious and paranoid (especially 20 years ago!), to be operating under the assumption that your own equipment is working against you.
- lostlogin 5y agoIt doesn’t take long as a system administrator to become certain that printers are working against you. By and large they have user hostile hardware and software.
- tablespoon 5y ago> By and large they have user hostile hardware and software. Eh, typical "user hostile hardware and software" is not even in the same league as exfiltrating your data to an adversary.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoIt's fair play to act like any gov is doing this. E.G: Microsoft being American (and them being part of PRISM), I just assume the OS has a backdoor for the US gov. Now with Windows 10 heavy telemetry, it's even easier. I work for a client doing chips for credit cards. Did you know they are now full blown computers that can run a light version of Java (Java Card) ? The company is building their own hardware and software, and just to get to a conference room, you need biometric access + badge + pin code. Pretty sure they send data to my country agencies in some way despite having to trick the banking system to do so for them. Same from any software, server/cloud hosting or hardware. If it comes from a specific country, this country is most probably using it for intelligence. It doesn't even need to be on a network now, because there is so much interactivity with all devices. And eventually, one will be.
- beebmam 5y agoIt's pretty absurd to both sides something like this. Do you have evidence that the US government is doing this on computers it sells overseas, or is this just magical speculation?
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoI heard your type of argument about the US mass spying before Snowden, and surprise, we were not conspirationists after all. So call that educated magical speculation.
- space_fountain 5y agoWell, but correct me if I'm wrong, the Snowden leak included nothing like this. Instead it included a lot of things that would be a lot easier to do if Google/Microsoft ect just gave them access. The very fact they had to do everything else is at least evidence that don't have direct access
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoIt's just different use cases. Backdoors are more useful for targetted operations or specific data exfiltration, while plugging yourself to back bones is more useful for mass surveillance. I don't even see why it's controversial to hold this opinion. Reading some comments, people seems to feel offended we could think that from the USA. If anything, the USA are, with Russia and China, among the countries anybody in Europe like me would suspect the most about pulling things like this. The CIA and NSA have a terrible reputation, and the track record to support it. We are talking about a country that went to war while lying about WMD against the UN vote, made money with south american cocaine while organizing coup after coup, elected Bush and Trump yet punished Chelsea Manning. A country that is still under the temporary 9/11 Patriot act, it used to mass spy on its entire population. Of course I'm assuming the worse from them. And yes, it's fair. Actually, even if I were proven to be completely wrong in 10 years, it still would have been fair. But I'm not even assuming that only from the US, but basically from any gov, including mine. Because history taught us that's what power does. It's sane to be suspicious of people in power. Necessary for democracy, even.
- antishatter 5y agoPrinters are a huge attack vector that often go unnoticed by less competent IT folk. This is one reason why I try to avoid hardware from mainland companies like lenovo. Not that you can avoid it entirely but I try.
- amelius 5y agoDid you report them to the CIA?
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