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Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms
An anonymous reader writes "A former Pentagon analyst reports the Chinese government has 'pervasive access' to about 80 percent of the world's communications, and it is looking currently to nail down the remaining 20 percent. Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE Corporation are reportedly to blame for the industrial espionage. 'Not only do Huawei and ZTE power telecom infrastructure all around the world, but they're still growing. The two firms are the main beneficiaries for telecommunication projects taking place in Malaysia with DiGi, Globe in the Philippines, Megafon in Russia, Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates, America Movil in a number of countries, Tele Norte in Brazil, and Reliance in India.'"
This "former pentagon analyst"... Did he have access to intelligence reports of this nature? If so, and he's disclosing this now, I'm assuming the relevant documentation would be available via a Freedom of Information Act request? Since disclosing classified intelligence would be an act of treason, you know.
Just out of curiousity, this "former pentagon analyst" wouldn't happen to be employed with a defense firm now that would stand to profit from any products the company offers to combat this threat, would it? As many a scientist has uttered before, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." That doesn't change because we're discussing a matter of national security: You still have to put up, or shut up.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Seriously, I think that in the next war someone will have with China, it will be breathtaking how powerful and effective China's cyberattacks will be at breaking that country's will or ability to fight.
CISPA for telephony.
Isn't this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?
The US has echelon, spy satellites, and other ways to intercept communication and they're upset that China does it?
There was a story a few months ago about how Australia banned Huawei from involvment in a big project, they didnt say why.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/24/0424215/australian-govt-bans-huawei-from-national-network-bids
How is this espionage v NSA intercepting telecoms in US?
China is like every other sovereign nation with sufficient resources to spy on global citizens. If they can they are and will continue to do so. Not really news.
...is that we have access to 100% of Chi-com comms, including 100% military. We tend to be ahead of the curve. We just do not brag about it.
We even have the power to shutdown foreign companies like Megaupload w/o needing to prove they did anything wrong. But we're the "good" guys. So that makes it okay. After all we only killed 300,000 people this last decade, versus China who killed..... ummm..... wait there's something wrong with my theorem.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Not good, but what a bunch of kettle callers.
It seems like the chinese have all the freedom.
So some random guy who used to work in Place With A BIG Name mouths off about "phaer teh commies".
And then proceeds to cite absolutely ZERO evidence to back up his claims.
In most circles this would be considered libel of the worst kind (libel because it was written, slander is the same thing when applied orally), he deserves to be sued out of existence.
NOT that I have any reason to disagree with the core of his argument "Don't trust them, they're backed by the government of someone we used to hate vehemently". But only because I mostly agree with the primary tenet of The X-Files (ie Trust No-One. at least not where the issue of trust *really really* matters).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I can assure you that China has access to America's back door.
We sure have been getting it up the ass.
*humph*
-db
There's something of a cottage industry in spreading FUD about Huawei and ZTE. Why should anyone believe this stuff? (Or, for that matter, why should we believe much of anything in the news or on web sites?)
Actually they DID say why: specifically it boiled down to "because we cannot be *absolutely certain* that the Chinese Government does not have such a close relationship with Huawei that deploying their equipment would not (ever) compromise our national security".
Seems to me that someone in The Australian Government has learned a few important life lessons from The X-Files. (ie trust No-One).
Either that (a) or (b) they're just playing The Obvious "Devil You Know / Devil You Don't" card; and/or decisions were influenced by vendor-$ and Huawei could-not/would-not/weren't-given-a-chance-to cough up enough.
Personally Option (b) sounds more typical of government.
I for one will be eternally surprised to see any government making a well researched, informed, well reasoned decision - they're almost always a pack of retarded monkeys interested in looking after themselves and their friends.
Go On Mr Government - PROVE ME WRONG - I Dares Ya!
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
His sole reasoning on this is that Chinese companies made it. This goes along with assuming everybody from the middle east is a terrorist and all white people are republicans.
You are going to have to work hard to convince me this is anything more than an article paid for by a lobbying firm working for a US company trying to win a supply contract.
Penetrated 80% of the worlds telecoms? 80% of the worlds telecoms using one or more items of Huawei equipement does not mean 'penetrated'.
Unless you mean market penetration.
We Canadians got you with our Nortel DMS & Meridian systems.
Don't piss us off or we'll make you use 32 digit dialing you hoseheads!
How Israeli Backdoor Technology Penetrated the U.S. Government's Telecom System and Compromised National Security
An Israeli Trojan Horse
http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/09/27/an-israeli-trojan-horse/
... or does the US just use the front door?
I'm surprised at all the surprise?!
I thought it was pretty common knowledge that Huawei and ZTE were run and funded by the Chinese Military.
They have been using their financial muscle to undercut and bribe their equipment into as many countries telecoms infrastructure as they possibly can for over five years now.
I can tell you from experience that the level of corruption in Huawei rivals that of even American and British companies so I would suspect that was the issue (not the corruption, the getting caught).
China isn't the only country spying on the US
What he doesn't mention is how much access the US has. Most likely they have even more access.
The second link is to "World Net Daily", a site that has about as much credibility as the John Birch Society.
There are all sorts of ppl that are on this site, and others, saying to look the other way. The Chinese would NEVER spy on the west, or put in backdoors to use for an offensive attack. I mean, these ppl all know that the communist China are the good guys. Likewise, that bunch of Chinese naval ships caught 50 miles off the phillipines coast is a non-issue is well. The fact that they were close to a number of telecom trunks has no bearing on anything.
So, relax. China will not try what they did to India. And the communists are heading towards being capitalists so there is no chance that they are working to kill off the west.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
With CC to Israel, and any paying company, of course.
Or they knew the situation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
they'd be extraditing people for breaking US laws in their own countires left and right.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
And the US has used Echelon for industrial espionage against even its "allies" for 30 years.
U.S. government agencies pass wiretapped and intercepted information to American companies all the time. Trade secrets of non-U.S. energy companies have been passed to American companies, cell phone technology, labor negotiation strategies of non-U.S. companies with factories in the U.S. and intellectual property has been stolen and transferred for decades.
I don't understand how can this subject be brought up without talking about CALEA-compliant hardware?
The compliance to this wiretapping law may be usually implemented at a much-higher and easier-to-circument level but in spirit it very much achieves the same.
All Network hardware *is* backdoored, regardless of the manufacturer's country and that's a FACT. The only thing we can do is improve awareness of this so we system engineers, developers, system integrators can design, code and implement around that, as much as humanly possible.
The related news about cellphones as trackers helps drawing the bigger picture just as well.
My 2c.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Or they didn't get a big enough bribe.
Er. excuse me. 'Campaign contribution'. Yeah, that's the ticket...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
One one hand, this is credible. China has shown an extraordinary appetite for industrial espionage. On the other hand, the story seems to come from the same source that descredited itself lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify Irak invasion.
Coming from a "former" Pentagon analyst, can this information be trusted? Or has the same flavor as the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had that triggered the invasion?
Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care
How many rootkits does the US[2] use officially or unofficially?
How much of the free but proprietary software in the US spies on you?
Which software would that be?
Visit any of the top freeware sites in the US, count the number of thousands or millions of downloads of free but proprietary software, much of it works, again on a proprietary Operating System, with files stored or in transit.
How many free but proprietary programs have you downloaded and scanned entire hard drives, flash drives, and other media? Do you realize you are giving these types of proprietary programs complete access to all of your computer's files on the basis of faith alone?
If you are an atheist, the comparison is that you believe in code you cannot see to detect and contain malware on the basis of faith! So you do believe in something invisible to you, don't you?
I'm now going to touch on a subject most anti-malware, commercial or free, developers will DELETE on most of their forums or mailing lists:
APT malware infecting and remaining in BIOS, on PCI and AGP devices, in firmware, your router (many routers are forced to place backdoors in their firmware for their government) your NIC, and many other devices.
Where are the commercial or free anti-malware organizations and individual's products which hash and compare in the cloud and scan for malware for these vectors? If you post on mailing lists or forums of most anti-malware organizations about this threat, one of the following actions will apply: your post will be deleted and/or moved to a hard to find or 'deleted/junk posts' forum section, someone or a team of individuals will mock you in various forms 'tin foil hat', 'conspiracy nut', and my favorite, 'where is the proof of these infections?' One only needs to search Google for these threats and they will open your malware world view to a much larger arena of malware on devices not scanned/supported by the scanners from these freeware sites. This point assumed you're using the proprietary Microsoft Windows OS. Now, let's move on to Linux.
The rootkit scanners for Linux are few and poor. If you're lucky, you'll know how to use chkrootkit (but you can use strings and other tools for analysis) and show the strings of binaries on your installation, but the results are dependent on your capability of deciphering the output and performing further analysis with various tools or in an environment such as Remnux Linux. None of these free scanners scan the earlier mentioned areas of your PC, either! Nor do they detect many of the hundreds of trojans and rootkits easily available on popular websites and the dark/deep web.
Compromised defenders of Linux will look down their nose at you (unless they are into reverse engineering malware/bad binaries, Google for this and Linux and begin a valuable education!) and respond with a similar tone, if they don't call you a noob or point to verifying/downloading packages in a signed repo/original/secure source or checking hashes, they will jump to conspiracy type labels, ignore you, lock and/or shuffle the thread, or otherwise lead you astray from learning how to examine bad binaries. The world of Linux is funny in this way, and I've been a part of it for many years. The majority of Linux users, like the Windows users, will go out of their way to lead you and say anything other than pointing you to information readily available on detailed binary file analysis.
Don't let them get you down, the information is plenty and out there, some from some well known publishers of Linux/Unix books. Search, learn, and share the information on detecting and picking through bad binaries. But this still will not touch the void of the APT malware described above which will survive any wipe of r/w media. I'm convinced, on both *nix and Windows, these pieces of APT malware are government in origin. Maybe not from the US, but most of the 'curious' malware I've come across in poisoned binaries, were writte
... anyone?
A former Pentagon analyst
Now with Cisco marketing.
The source article is on http://www.wnd.com/, which is a pretty wacky looking right wing "news" site. Its top stories currently are :
Gun shop veto draws legal fight
Traveler says no to U.S. internal checkpoints
Blogger: Why don't blacks behave?
Cross-bearing Texas teen arrives In D.C.
Reviewer: It doesn't look like we're repenting
Poll: Majority favor extending all Bush tax rates
Detecting a trend?
Anyway the article in question simply says that 1) Chinese companies make most of the telecom switching gear. 2) Therefore, China's military has backdoored it all and is spying on every byte anyone transmits.
Of course, this is conceivable, but there isn't a shred of evidence. Spying on such a huge scale would require huge infrastructure and data transmission, basically duplicating the entire Internet. That might be detectable.
Firmware updates are an amazing thing.
Australia does not have the same issues as the USA. Here in the USA, our politicians are available to ANY foreign nation, as long as they pay in dollars. In all of the rest of the western nations, the politicians are at least somewhat loyal to their nation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media. (Former CIA Director, William Colby)
the chineese can build backdoors into the chips, because they do the manufacturing, but this sort of spying activity is not so much different than the american government / snoops requiring installation of their IP sniffers at google and every major ISP.. :-\\
they are both a form of censorship / control of communication — however, whereas the chineese govt tries to simply block dissenting traffic, the americans allow the traffic to flow, in order to allow it to lead them to the identify of whom they're after..
I'm not saying it can't be true just because a paranoid crackpot believes it, but check all the cited sources, and don't trust any statements that aren't backed up with verifiable evidence.
Rivals? Hah, try exceeds by a significant margin. China as a whole is incredibly corrupt on a level beyond the western world.
This says Australia won't share its national security data with China. China is an economic partner only. Indonesia was a military partner for a brief time. USA is a military, economic, legal partner and cultural overlord.
Certainly corruption in the west is just as bad as in China. The Chinese don't go to any great lengths to hide it. Corruption in the west is kept as quiet as possible.
This "former pentagon analyst" is a writer for WND, a rightwing web news site with all the credibility of the National Enquirer.
Has WND told us the truth yet about the two-headed slime aliens anal-probing the kidnapped Elvis on the Moon (preferably with grainy photos)? Until then, WND has only a fraction of the credibility of the National Enquirer.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Have you looked www.nationalenquirer.com recently? Can you give more a detailed reasoning on why anyone should take your statements seriously?
"The content of this website is not available in your area."
I definitely can't take the National Enquirer seriously. In fact, I can't take it at all!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Now all we need is a "former sports analyst" to say that China has access to 80% of the world's athletes as they have implanted nano-technology in the clothing. :)
Well, they're already supplying the uniforms of the US team...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The US government has backdoors into every telecom switch in the USA for CALEA wiretaps on the PSTN. This is not a secret.
They are actually banned at the NATO level, I believe. Because the Chinese government has got a large stake in Huawei, like in any Chinese company. It's not so much because they are Chinese, but because they are a government. Governments don't like that other governments deploy equipment on their premises.
The same happened in the early days with Check Point. You could see connections going to Israel and they wouldn't explain why. To this day they are still banned in many facilities because of this past history.
But, wait. What if the tinfoil was made in China? Or made from metal that was recycled in China? What if all the world's tinfoil contains secret Chinese backdoors to stop the proper functioning of tinfoil hats?
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Lie cheat and most importantly steal. It's the Chinese motto. Of course they likely learned it from us. The irony is that they have probably become better at it that we ever were. It's sad that we maintain trade relations with such an openly dishonest country.
If he says something like that, he has to tell us (ISP workers around the world) how he believes they are doing it so we can monitor for that. Just spreading FUD, with absolutely no content in it. He probably just wants a job somewhere
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.. advertising did CISCO buy for placing that story?
Don't get me wrong, it's eminently possible that there is espionage going on, but I see two immediate problems with those claims:
1 - given the massive spread of kit, simple statistic probability would have already yielded evidence of such backdoors. It's not like there aren't enough security people ou there capable of spotting anomalies.
2 - it builds a rather massive haystack in which to find a needle - I can't really believe the Chinese would repeat the mistakes of the various US attempts to backdoor kit (Clipper chip, anyone?).
So, I view this with some serious skepticism. I know it's popular to make the Chinese once again The Enemy (funny that there is always someone who is enemy du jour once the other ones go quiet - heard of any terrorists lately?), but so far I have seen precious little in hard evidence. I know they're damn good at copying what they get their hands on (sadly they don't improve it like the Japanese used to do), but the current paranoia seems to serve other purposes.
We were told we were being melodramatic, paranoid and isolationist when a lot of us went up against Dan Griswold and the CATO Institute's mantra of "people, goods and services" as fungible entities to be moved around, swapped out and relocated according to "market" forces.
Seems like people and the suppliers of services they work for aren't really much like cogs at all, but more like intentional actors with conscious , non-monetizable value systems which motivate their individual actions and determine the historic outcome between competing geo-political forces.
Wow, who would have ever saw that crazy curve ball coming at ya?
This is like the chinese press reporting on a former PLA officer saying that the USA has backdoors all over the world thanks to Cisco. And we all know Cisco has tight relationships with the Pentagon...
On the US a lot of people see China as some kind of lawless state, and in fact companies like Huawei and ZTE (as well as the Chinese government that supports them) are mainly motivated by profit, they just want to sell more hardware to more telcos... but this should be obvious.
Next time you find some propagandistic news like this, try reversing the players and see if it sounds stupid or utterly paranoid. And BTW, Cisco routers are backdoored in several ways, look for instance at their features to support "Lawful" Interception.
If the source code were free and publicly available.... still... how do you verify the code on the device was compiled from the source you were given, and
there's not a hardware component that changes the code after it's in memory?
Unless it's the chips/ASICs that have backdoors, and not the code that runs on the chips.
The Chinese are not likely to waterboard me, or murder everyone in my neighborhood by an "accidental" drone attack, because of something I said on the Internet. The U.S. government very well might. I fear the U.S. government far more than the Chinese, and I would even if I were a Chinese citizen living in China. Not that the Chinese human rights record is great; it is somewhere between appalling and worse; but it still does not begin to compare with the U.S. government and its 200+ year long history of torturing, enslaving, and murdering innocent people both here and abroad. If by stealing its secrets the Chinese manage to prevent a war against the U.S. government - or to prevail, should they be unable to avoid it - the world, and even the U.S., will be much better off.
Nonaggression works!
Imagine a chip, made in China, that has a network connection (to China) and can DMA to/from your RAM.
Oh, hey, you have one: your Ethernet chip. Shit. We're fucked.
Also notice the chips in your wireless router, cable modem, cell phone, cell tower, USB stick, USB port, etc.
The moment any such 'bug' went active, it would set off alarms -- by necessity, the communications would have to occur over the provider's own network. Unless their network admins are idiots they should notice the abberant traffic.
No way. How exactly are you going to view that traffic? You can't usefully plug an Ethernet cable into your head. You'll need an Ethernet chip, made by GUESS WHO...
Yep, the magic packets will NOT be reported to your OS. Either they get dropped, or they get sent directly (via DMA) to some other Chinese chip. Nothing will show up in Wireshark.
for the U.S. government including agencies like NSA, CIA, etc.?
posting anon, but Ive seen first hand that huawei have a software tool that can extract all the passwords out of a system in plaintext, that if you call in engineering they will run. So all your passwords will end up back in china.
I also know that another guy first hand, who found a firmware with a attack mode embedded into it, flooding, packet dumping, mangling etc etc, and he allegedly questioned them about it, and was told it was a "experimental lab firmware that accidentally got loaded" and told to stfu by his manager.
Communism over Americans it is that simple.
you buy use communist goods your a commie.
Google and the US police state are afraid of a little fair competition?
I visited Huawei on a support trip last year, on behalf of my employer. (Hence, posting anonymously.)
I can honestly say I've never been to a more paranoid company. The team I was helping (the maintenance team for this particular bit of telecoms software) didn't even have the unlock key to unlock the loaded memory image. (The chips involved have a RAM lockdown mechanism that can secure their contents against modification after loading with a 128-bit key.) So, while we could modify the program and upload new images, we couldn't effectively postmortem or probe the system after a crash.
The company was very compartmentalized with information shared on a need-to-know basis. They had to contact another team to get the unlock key, and get management approval, etc. for the transfer. (This, for now 4 years old telecoms equipment.) Our company's representatives were only allowed to directly touch one machine, running a web-browser pointed at our corporate website (for downloading documentation), and our session was monitored remotely via VNC or something like it.
I was warned not to bring a laptop or even a thumb drive. If I had brought a laptop, it would only have been allowed in if all the ports were glued shut.
I would expect that level of paranoia and security at a defense contractor, not the telephone company. But then...
Oddly enough, they were only paranoid about their own IP. They are apparently more than happy to share our competitors' advance information with us (to which we say "No, we don't want that liability!"). Hmmm...
that virtually all the found backdoors originated in the US. Virtually no Chinese back doors have been found yet.
Anyone with a network sniffer can see that Huawei devices are infested with "phone-home" malwares.
I've always been saying (anonymously) on /. that Huawei was a chinese-state-sponsored company whose purpose was espionnage. I don't even understand why their sh*t are still allowed in the U.S.
They're spying on U.S. industries. They're spying on U.S. military. They're spying on U.S. citizens.