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U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack
- mh_ 13y agoI guess at this point, its fair to ask all those previous commenters who were telling us: "It just doesn't work like that.. We were in the dept of defense.. you guys don't understand" to comment..
- slashdotaccount 13y agoYou can download the documents from CryptoMe: ANT Files (16.2M ZIP) : http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-catalog.zip http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-catalog.zip QUANTUM Tasking (5.7M) - http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-quantum-tasking.pdf http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-quantum-tasking.pdf QUANTUM Theory (2.5M) - http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-quantumtheory.pdf http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-quantumtheory.pdf
- streetnigga 13y agoCrypTome, Mr President.
- gonvaled 13y agoIn the U.S., military espionage is heroic and economic espionage is a crime. In China, the line is not that clear. Let me say this: BULLSHIT, a thousand times. Who says this? Any of the companies who have been lying to their customers? Any of the government agencies which have not explained anything about the NSA activities (not that they would know what is going on)? Any of the officials caught lying, one and again? The US will not perform economic espionage as long as the US has a technological edge (which is probably not anymore the case in lots of areas). Which brings us to an important observation: OCDE rules forbidding economic espionage are designed to keep the current technological status quo; any country is well advised to sign them to be accepted to the club, and immediately throw the rules to the garbage bin. Because we can be sure that any country capable of doing economic espionage has been doing it, is doing it, and will continue to do it, no matter the rules, no matter if they get caught, no matter the hypocrital public posturing of their leaders. Those rules, and the whole "Intellectual Property" apparatus, is there for the suckers to respect them. The US, in particular, has never respected those rules.
- wavefunction 13y agoOne of my coworkers actually expressed this sentiment to me. He's generally a smart guy but I don't know how you get across how damaging this is to basic commerce. The NSA is destroying the American technical industry piece by piece. How do we approach this existential crisis, when the folks behind the NSA apparently don't give a shit what damage they do to America?
- clavalle 13y agoHere's the thing: Every country that CAN collect data IS collecting data. If they are manufacturing anything that can be hacked to collect data and they can feasibly get away with it (read: there is no independent oversight), you can bet it is being done. Germany is no different than France is no different from the US is no different than China etc. etc. The only difference is they haven't had their Snowdens come out of the woodwork yet. I can guarantee the US intelligence apparatus is right now trying to figure out how to out a few of these foreign programs so that the US does not look quite so bad in comparison without causing a diplomatic meltdown.
- fforw 13y agoI think it's deluded to expect any country to come even close to what the US is doing except maybe China. The budgets of all are not anywhere high enough to pull such a thing off. The US has moved on a dark and lonely path after 9/11.. Not only in espionage, but also in remote killings, illegal imprisonment and torture. To say others do just the same seems deluded.
- bananacurve 13y agoEurope outsources a good deal of their defense and intelligence to the US, and for good reason, why spend money on redundant systems when the West is working together. http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.7611.html http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...
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- blazespin 13y agoWhy do you think the US was so concerned about buying gear from China? They just realized that since they're doing it, China is probably doing it as well.
- Alphasite_ 13y agoPrecisely this. I would be surprised if most people haven't realised this by now.
- salient 13y agoI've noticed this before. They start sounding the trumpet about some dangers, after they already do them themselves - like when they said that cyber-attacks should be considered acts of war because they can put infrastructures in danger, basically months before they launched Stuxnet against Iran, or when they started warning about cyber-attacks putting banks in danger, and then we found out this year that NSA can access bank accounts and even modify them. So next time when they warn about some other danger, I think we can assume they've already done it themselves to others. As for the "IP stealing" that they keep accusing China of, it may be true, but NSA probably steals information from other corporations more than anyone, since they have access to everything, and I'm not so sure China does, too. Most of the world's Internet traffic goes through US, and they have access to that, and as we've seen to the private networks of the world's largest service companies, too, like Google, Yahoo and so on. They also have access to most of Europe's data through UK/Sweden cables. China doesn't have any of this, and could only dream of such access.
- xdd 13y agotelevision brain washed by George Bush? How exactly NSA can access to everything is a good thing?
- moootPoint 13y agoThe liar's punishment is they can trust no one
- fit2rule 13y ago
- bobjordan 13y agoTime seems ripe for open source networking equipment movement. Can't trust closed source solutions.
- beagle3 13y agoThat's a nice but naive sentiment. You can rest assured your hardware is similarly trojaned - whether it is your CPU, your Ethernet controller or your network switch. No, I do not have first hand knowledge about CPU trojaning by the NSA. But given everything else, I'd be surprised if they don't have access to the CPU itself.
- fit2rule 13y agoSo you think the NSA is going to destroy consumer computing, then?
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y agoThey don't seem to care if they do.
- asveikau 13y agoWhat would the point be of intercepting shipments if the job is already done? Are you saying they are doing this work redundantly? Also we don't know what percentage of shipments are intercepted. If this is the primary means of attack it seems a bit shy of "you can rest assured" that your hardware in particular is affected. (Or at this rate perhaps we can wait for the next revelation to show us. :P)
- beagle3 13y ago> What would the point be of intercepting shipments if the job is already done? Are you saying they are doing this work redundantly? Have you ever seen a government job that wasn't redundant? But seriously - if you want to make sure that what you are doing works, you have to use redundancies. Many of them, in fact. > If this is the primary means of attack it seems a bit shy of "you can rest assured" that your hardware in particular is affected. (Or at this rate perhaps we can wait for the next revelation to show us. I'm sure it is not the primary means of attack. Here's a hypothetical scenario: You work at Cisco or Intel, designing firmware / microcode. The NSA appears at your door with an NSL saying you can't disclose anything, not even to your boss - and a carrot: Get $200K to insert this backdoor into the new x86 / megarouter. And also a stick - if you don't comply, showing your wife all of the correspondence you have with your mistress (which they gleaned from earlier interception) or giving the DEA a recording of you asking your friend to bring some pot over. You think that's crazy? Ladar Levison, Joseph Nacchio and Edward Snowden indicate that's business as usual. I have no knowledge of anything other than what I read in the guardian/hn etc -- but given all that is public, I'd be surprised if this scenario hasn't played out a few times. Or a few hundred times.
- dnautics 13y agoIs it just me or does this seem to be a tortured argument - the US suggested that huawei might be implementing backdoors in their product out of the box, is not the same thing as the US security agency actively searching for exploits for the product. One is a collaborative effort to sell someone a defective product (could be fraud) the other is a adversarial effort that is a natural part of the security industry cycle.
- EthanHeilman 13y ago>the US suggested that huawei might be implementing backdoors in their product out of the box, is not the same thing as the US security agency actively searching for exploits for the product. The US has also been adding hardware backdoors by intercepting mail as it travels across US friendly territories. Furthermore, the US backdoored RSA's RNG 'out of the box', and reports suggest it has backdoored other things 'out of the box'. The argument as I understood it was this, US: "China valves its 'dominance of cyberspace' over the security of both itself and the community of nations, therefore using hardware produced in China will probably make everyone, including the US, less safe". It is a good argument in general form and it addresses an important need for security because this sort of gear is used in nuclear power plants, air defense grids, hydroelectric dams, etc (note that Hardware backdoors have covert radios for bridging airgaps). These backdoors, even if not exploited by the Chinese, could fall into arbitrary hands[1] and cause significant economic damage. EDIT: People are downvoting this comment. As downvoting is your right please continue to do so but feedback is welcome. I care about understanding this issue and I want to know why you disagree with my comment. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnational_organized_crime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnational_organized_crime
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoThere's just an important distinction that you're missing. If the NSA is intercepting devices and bugging them, then it doesn't really matter which brand you buy - you're being targeted as an individual. Order a Huawei phone and they'll (presumably) try to intercept and compromise it. Country of origin doesn't really matter, because (presumably) the NSA isn't compromising the company producing the device, they're compromising the delivery chain which handles all (most) devices. The reason to avoid Huawei (according to some US gov't sources, evidently) is that Chinese security services may have compromised the company's structure itself; thus all products they create may have backdoors/trojans already in them. These two situations aren't even in the same universe.
- Irishsteve 13y agoThe consistently frustrating thing about all these 'revelations' is that the US government allegedly do it only for national security concerns where as other nations does it for corporate espionage.
- nxbtch 13y agohey,guys. i am from china. I just wanna say, happy new year. and internet has not border.
- bananacurve 13y agoYes. Our governments may act like asses, but we don't have to. Happy New Year.
- a3n 13y agoHappy New Year.
- brandon272 13y agoHappy New Year!
- gdy 13y agoHappy New Year
- gaius 13y agoIt's a good way to think about it, that the US is now in a Cold War with the entire rest of the world.
- bananacurve 13y agoNot quite. http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.7611.html http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...
- a3n 13y agoGovernments are "now in a Cold War with the [citizens of the] entire rest of the world." Better?
- throwwit 13y agoContinuously stock piling exploits cannot lead to any desired end game. It's probably beneficial there's some deflating of all this stuff.
- ck2 13y agoMessing with the manufacturing base for maybe 80% of all USA non-food goods is probably a very bad idea. Sure we can open source our router software for review but what if their hacks are right in the chips being made in China. Don't US fighter jets and bombers use some electronics made in China too?
- askar_yu 13y agoIt's important to note that during the USG vs Huawei discussions there were no actual proofs brought by the USG about the allegations it pressed on Huawei. Huawei even wrote an open letter just two years ago asking for investigation and denying all the allegations http://www.huawei.com/ilink/en/about-huawei/newsroom/press-release/HW_092875 http://www.huawei.com/ilink/en/about-huawei/newsroom/press-r... Later on Huawei testified before the US House http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQjSCUpt4s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQjSCUpt4s To my knowledge, no response has been made by USG justifying the allegations it was making when it was openly called by Huawei. Given all of this, I find it ironic the comments here such as "backdoors in Huawei's devices" are taken for granted. Now with the latest leaks exposing hacking by the USG itself the tone of the conversation (including the comments in HN) has not changed. What am I missing? The only noticeable change seems was the decreased tone of the US media (CNN alikes) who used to shout extremely loud that 'Those Chinese are hacking our systems!'. At the very least frequency of such news got decreased ever since the leaks.