Black Duck Eggs and Other Secrets of Chinese Hacks

Roberto123 writes "Network World offers some insights into the way China infiltrates US organizations, physically and via computer, to steal information. Security expert Ira Winkler says there are far more serious threats out there than the 'laughable' uproar over China's hack of Google."

Comments

The article draws weird conclusions.

[flowerp]

My wife has no problems buying black eggs of any kind in asia stores in Germany. Oh, and black eggs can be mailed long distance, it's fermented and thereby preserved food.

And you really can't conclude from the menu of a chinese restaurant what's going or not going on behind the scenes. I call bullshit on this one. No corporate espionage ring would need to use a "safe house" or "safe restaurant" for that matter to drop off secret information or to secretly meet. It's the information age, dummies!

Re:The article draws weird conclusions.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF. Century eggs are to Chinese people what pickles are to Americans... they're not a rare delicacy at all. You can make them in your own home. You can buy them at the freaking Asian corner store. Anyone who fails to find a century egg in San Francisco is a real moron.

And organized crime? Give me a break. If you see sardines in a grocery, do you jump to the conclusion that it's operated by the Mafia?

Re:The article draws weird conclusions.

[interkin3tic]

Exactly, and could someone please tell me how this gives the conclusion that it's a Chinese cyber espionage front? I mean, seriously?

Inside the black eggs were USB drives with google's search algorithms. It's sloppy editing not to include that in the article, but it's even sloppier espionage on the restaurant's part to advertise that fact on the menu.

I gotta agree.

[khasim]

And furthermore:

Besides continually innovating at hacking computer networks in the U.S. and globally, Chinese interests also hack companies physically by infiltrating them with people who can then be recruited as spies, Winkler said.

Huh? I can see infiltrating them with spies ... but infiltrating them with people who you will then try to recruit to be a spy?

Isn't that a bit ... stupid?

Re:I gotta agree.

[thesaurus]

And this is why we're screwed trying to stop Chinese espionage...our security consultants are frakking morons.

Re:I gotta agree.

[stephanruby]

Not if you know you will be able to manipulate the recruits. China has a lot of control over the lives of those peoples relatives back home.

This assumes that all the Chinese expats even *like* their family back home. I can tell you from personal observation that the more a person stays in the US, the less and less they like their family from back home.

Re:I gotta agree.

[spazdor]

If the Chinese government is attempting this kind of extortion on a large scale, we have to assume that some of those attempts will be failures, and that some of those failures will be loud.

As far as I know, no Chinese immigrant has yet come forward with allegations that this happened to them. Which means either it's 100% effective, or else it's not happening.

Re:I gotta agree.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If the Chinese government is attempting this kind of extortion on a large scale, we have to assume that some of those attempts will be failures, and that some of those failures will be loud.

You are right, holding the family at home hostage is just stupid.
On the other hand - giving them special treatment, like getting the kids into a better school, moving a sick relative up the line for organ transplant, that kind of stuff is easy to do hush-hush.

And, of course, that's not the only thing they do. They also play on feelings of nationalism. Just because a guy leaves his country of birth for better opportunities doesn't mean he thinks the country is shit, in fact he may even want to go back and if he can contribute to the economic development of the country that may even make it possible for him to go back and get the kind of job that didn't exist when he left.

Re:I gotta agree.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a China hater. You might be right about family being important in Chinese culture, but it's not worship, by any means. You make us sound like non-humans. I have to try not to get angry at your war mentality, but instead put forth my understanding.

Family is a different concept in Chinese culture, it works like this: In Western culture, Mother may say one thing, and Grandmother may say another thing, but ultimately Mother gets her say.

In traditional Chinese culture, and I put a strong emphasis on traditional, Grandmother may say one thing, and Mother will go along with it. After all, she's older. Please bear in mind that with the new urbanization in China, this style is shifting as the fast-paced change in urban society makes it harder for older people to remain saavy their entire lives.

So, we Chinese are people too. Please be nice.

Re:Hmmm ...

[interkin3tic]

That seems to be all the evidence needed.

From TFA:

"I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.

Sounds like this security consultant is pretty quick to assume that we need more security. I wonder why.

And it's not just that one restaurant. Check out this menu, something definitely smells fishy about it to me. No doubt it's a north korean spy base.

Why even risk the possibility?

[khasim]

Not if you know you will be able to manipulate the recruits. China has a lot of control over the lives of those peoples relatives back home.

Why even risk the possibility that one of them will NOT take the offer?

Cut out the middleman and simply send them spies to be hired. Spies who have ALREADY agreed to be spies for you.

Re:Why even risk the possibility?

[T Murphy]

A company won't likely hire or retain someone who seems to be a spy. Given new hires will get more attention, if they are all spies there is a fair risk of at least one raising suspicion- depending on how connected all the spies are, this can really cause problems for all of them. If China lets the new hires adjust to being a new employee, then pull them into being a spy, they can just focus on the ones who end up in positions or career paths that are useful for spying, and the spies are comfortable enough with their job they shouldn't be drawing unnecessary attention anyways. Also, college graduates have a lot of choices to work with- if they are allowed to settle down a bit, they won't see nearly as many alternatives to giving in to being a spy, should they not be nationalistic enough to like spying.

Companies aren't likely to hire senior engineers/programmers/etc. with their only work experience being in China- the best way to get someone into the desired position is to get hired from graduation and work up to the position. May as well let the future spy fit in as a typical bright college student, then deal with the spy recruiting phase between them getting hired and waiting until they've been working long enough to have proper access to the desired information or system.

Re:the lede

[EEPROMS]

Hate to blow you out of the water but the US government does leak private details of foreign companies collected by it's national security agencies. A good example was the US government being caught red handed leaking secret wheat price bids from Canadian companies to local US suppliers collected by the NSA. So if the US is happy to stab a trading partner like Canada in the back what do you think they are doing to none aligned entities like China!

Re:this was in his book

[ciaohound]

So, you'd say this "security egghead" is a bit of a quack?

(ducks)

Re:Hmmm ...

[gyrogeerloose]

I find his statement that he can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, which has one of the largest Chinese populations outside of Asia, hard to believe. I can get black duck eggs here in San Diego, which is a bit of a cultural backwater compared to the Bay Area.

Re:Hmmm ...

[magarity]

I can get black duck eggs here in San Diego
 
As if San Diego wasn't home to the largest base of the US Navy! Coincidence? I think not! My rates for security consultation are quite reasonable, I assure you.

Re:Hmmm ...

[sylpherware]

Definitely fishy about that menu... IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE FOR A CHINESE RESTAURANT! For $10, (in ANY English-speaking country's currency) that fried rice better be some top-of-the-line rice with corn-fed organic egg cooked to golden perfection!

Seriously though, this article is interesting in 2 ways. 1st, "black duck eggs" may be a delicacy, but it's not that rare nor it is expensive. The only way that it's not in the SF area would be that it doesn't comply with the food safety code, like a lot of Chinese food. (Just because white folks can't stomach our food doesn't mean it's poisonous.)

2nd, I actually talked to a guy who enrolled in a Chinese university for their "spy" recruit. He was there for a year before getting an offer to come study overseas. Sometimes we still wonder if he's still working for their government... Anyway, he was saying how all the guys were really plain-looking, and the girls are hot as hell, and very seductive at that too. SO, what you should be looking out for at your work place are: plain-looking Chinese dudes and hot Chinese girls!

What the duck?

[XiaoMing]

I'm not sure if the author of the article is actually a moron who can't shop and also a complete racist, or smart enough to realize his article would have no readers without putting in a culturally ignorant title, but I'd like to know where the hell he has been shopping in SF.

First of all, you can get black duck eggs damn near everywhere. I can get them in Fremont, Sunnyvale, or Cupertino, California at a variety of locations (Lions, 99Ranch, etc.), and I'm PRETTY sure you'd be able to find it in one of the biggest Chinatowns this country has to offer.
Hell I live in Madison, Wisconsin now and I'm 10 minutes (walking distance) away from a run down Chinese grocery outlet the size of a 7-11 that sells black duck eggs, and two out of the three crappy fast-food only takeout restaurants here serve porridge with black duck eggs.

To use decades old "cultural insight" that black duck eggs are a "Chinese Delicacy" without realizing that within the last two decades foods and goods Chinese people have only heard about in stories have become commonplace items not only in China, but also internationally as exports, is just pathetic.

But I guess there really was no other way to emphasize the ridiculously commonplace adage--that the human link is the weakest in security--without resorting to making ridiculous and dated cultural assumptions.

It's alright that he's not too good with cultures and people I guess. I mean, he's Russian after all, they're only good at math and physics.

Chinese espionage is not innocuous

[MasaMuneCyrus]

The author didn't state it elegantly, but he still made the point -- Chinese industrial espionage is very real, is here now, and it is state-sponsored. China views hacking not only as a fast-track to becoming an industrial superpower, but they view it as a method of becoming a military superpower, too. A good part of China's military buildup involves locating and training talented young people, as well as hiring the already established hacker-underground folk for military purposes. They figure (probably correctly) that they are nowhere near capable of competing with the US military on a technological front, but if they can shut down our command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) networks (not coincidentally, this is also why they developed the satellite-killing missile), then they have essentially shut us down, especially for any military response to an attack on Taiwan.

Here are just a few examples of the many, many already known about cases of Chinese espionage.
- The infamous Cox Report (regarding the PRC stealing our most advanced nuclear weapon designs)
- The well-known Google attacks
- A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC
- The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC.
- The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage. For example, high-profile UK businessmen have been approached by PRC spies with lavish gifts which include USB flash drives infected with trojans to steal information, and in 2008, an aide to Gordon Brown had his Blackberry stolen after a sexy Chinese woman approached him in Beijing -- a classic, almost too classic to be true, Soviet-style tactic. Other diplomats, too, have been sexually blackmailed by the PRC to divulge information.
- Here is a research paper by Northrop Grumman regarding China's cyber-warfare abilities, 88 pages filled with the stuff. Turn to page 67 for a "Timeline of Significant Chinese Related Cyber Events 1999-Present," let alone the details of the rest of the paper which shows the large effort by the PRC to improve their cyber-warfare and espionage abilities.

Here are some more excerpts:

MI5 Report

The MI5 report described how China’s computer hacking campaign had attacked British defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as public relations companies and international law firms. The document explicitly warned British executives dealing with China against so-called honey trap methods in which it said the Chinese tried to cultivate personal relationships, “often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” either within China or abroad.

“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it warned. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”

Re:Chinese espionage is not innocuous

[jandersen]

The author didn't state it elegantly, but he still made the point -- Chinese industrial espionage is very real, is here now, and it is state-sponsored.

I don't think he - or you - has any point besides the obvious. Do you really imagine that guys like you are the only ones that know about these things? Or that China is the only country that does it?

There is no need to go looking for enemies in China or Russia - they are big nations, and they have a clear and obvious interest in not upsetting the balance in the world too much; if one of the big nations were to fail, it would hurt every nation in the world, so America, Russia, China etc are going to protect each others' interests and stability, at least against major upsets. Would China benefit from America suddenly being relegated to the bottom? Of course not - what would happen to their exports and the stability of their currency? No, China is America's friend, at least in the same sense that your business partners are your friends.

The real enemies of America (and China, Russia, ...) are the crackpots who are willing to throw away their own life to hurt you, followed closely by conspiracy theorists, that keep dreaming up sensational "threats", but somehow miss the real ones.

So, how do you know that you are not a conspiracy theorist? Simple: if you are willing to change your opinion in the light of evidence, then you are not one.

Re:Chinese espionage is not innocuous

[gov_coder]

China is not trying to 'kill' America. They are simply trying to steal from it. And that potentially amounts to a slow and painful 'death'. That the author advocates being cognizant of these facts is not ignorance or racism, but rather prudence. Like all facts, they must be balanced with others, for a wise perspective to take form; but surely the scale of Chinese espionage is something all of us can see as a significant problem.

Re:RACE CARD RACE CARD RACE CARD

[Jawnn]

Potential Chinese spy. Potential illegal immigrant. They all look the same to us here in Arizona.

Unsubstantiated, possibly racist FUD

[FoolishOwl]

The article basically lays out this argument:

1. There's a Chinese restaurant in the midwest somewhere that, shockingly, serves Chinese food.
2. Graduate students from China have been observed speaking Chinese on the telephone, and at least sometimes, they were speaking to the Chinese consulate -- which is suspicious, since consulates provide services to a nation's citizens living abroad.
3. Therefore, there is a massive Chinese campaign of computer espionage, which is so effective that we can't actually detect anything happening.

I read the article, expecting at least some cursory information about system cracking techniques that have been detected. Instead, there's just this vapid paranoia that Chinese people may be up to something. It smacks of racism.

No, there's a lot of this and it's real

[Anonymous Coward]

I look at all this smug poo-pooing of the possibility of Chinese espionage and have to shake my head. Please don't be so smug. I'm a longterm contractor in Silicon Valley and I know about a number of genuine espionage situations. There was a Chinese-backed semiconductor company here a decade ago, you'd know the name. They made chips in volume for PCs and laptops. As a contractor I discovered they had in the heart of their popular products a DSP engine designed by TI which they'd pirated. They'd had help taking it from TI and it was clear there was at least one plant within TI by the Chinese. Their government shared useful information and ran a lot of recruited engineers inside companies here. I remember various newspaper stories over the years about engineers caught redhanded taking designs out of the country.

The same company had financial help building and running a motel nearby in Fremont where some of their customers stayed, but it also many other business people meeting with various companies. The motel was bugged, I was told by a close Chinese-American friend in the semi company. The semi firm got the customer private conversations and I think phone conversations.

In another case, an Israeli telecom chip company was designing software that is used in many datacom systems through which a LOT of US packets flow. I heard that there were backdoors in the hardware/software systems they sold to major communications operators. Some of us non-Israelis knew that Mossad ran some of the people in the company, but what could we do about it? The company got financial backing from Israeli intelligence but it would have been hard to prove since it was run through the Cayman Islands.

A lot of designs and technology have been pirated by Chinese, Taiwanese, and other governments. It's somewhat common knowledge here. And there are some very worrisome backdoors, for example the known sly replications of chips used in routers but with additional logic for remote access. The US military is well aware of this and there have been published stories about it. Just because the black egg story has credibility issues doesn't mean others aren't more solid.