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China Hacked Norway's Visma To Steal Client Secrets, Investigators Say (reuters.com)

Posted by msmash on from the growing-tension dept.

A prolific espionage group, which the U.S. government believes is Chinese, compromised billion-dollar business service provider Visma in 2018, according to a report by Recorded Future, a threat intelligence firm. From a report: The attack was part of what Western countries said in December is a global hacking campaign by China's Ministry of State Security to steal intellectual property and corporate secrets, according to Recorded Future. China's Ministry of State Security has no publicly available contacts. The foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment, but Beijing has repeatedly denied any involvement in cyber-enabled spying. Visma took the decision to talk publicly about the breach to raise industry awareness about the hacking campaign, which is known as Cloudhopper and targets technology service and software providers in order reach their clients. Cyber security firms and Western governments have warned about Cloudhopper several times since 2017 but have not disclosed the identities of the companies affected.

10 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. China doesn't know how innovate by sinij · · Score: 4, Informative

    Intellectual property theft is existential necessity for China. Its culture of conformity and rigid hierarchy greatly impedes home-grown innovation. So they have to steal tech from the West or fall behind.

    1. Re:China doesn't know how innovate by sinij · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There isn't much conformity in the West on anything, and in the West hierarchy is one based mostly on competence. Unlike China, where hierarchy is mostly based on seniority and connections.

      The West can innovate because the best and brightest raise to the top. China can't innovate because the most connected and people who put in most time-in raise to the top.

    2. Re:China doesn't know how innovate by sinij · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It is not obvious to me that "after developing industry and copying technology" the next step is inevitable progression to original solutions.

      Do you have any evidence of anything being developed in-house in China that isn't copied? Even military technology is copied from the West, like laughable attempts to reverse-engineer stealth technology, that failed even after purchasing US wrecks from Pakistan for hundreds of millions.

    3. Re: China doesn't know how innovate by sinij · · Score: 1

      5G is Qualcomm technology, licensed by Huawei. It wasn't invented in China.

    4. Re: China doesn't know how innovate by Ogive17 · · Score: 1

      Fireworks.

      What China lacks currently is a competent management class. There is no shortage of highly intelligent individuals or hard working people, just the right type of person to push the envelope.

      --
      "Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
    5. Re: China doesn't know how innovate by LostMyBeaver · · Score: 1

      I've been thinking the same way... maybe a little less on the conspiracy side.

      The way I see it, 5G is more or less the last upgrade for a while. Whoever bags this one will make a lot of money on it. Huawei is practically giving their stuff away compare to what the western companies are charging. I work for a big telco... so big that Huawei rents about a thousand square meters of office space a few floors above where I sit to be closer to us. We'll are one of the world's largest customers for 5G and whoever we buy our 5G network from will make billions from us. If we buy Huawei, we'll save probably $2-3 billion over buying from their nearest competitor. (don't buy stocks on this information, I don't see the papers and I'm not in the meetings, this is all from public shareholder reports).

      The university where I'm doing my grad work runs a super computing program, I'm working on RDMA over classic Ethernet (instead of converged) as a research topic in HPC. We use Huawei ARM based servers for the nodes.

      If the FUD mongers manage to accomplish their goals, we'll be forced to dump Huawei in both places due to "national security". (again public news). We are fighting it tooth and nail because all of our systems are either relatively safe from hackers since we don't exactly expose important systems to the outside world... or we simply give China or India the passwords anyway since we pay them for operations. Why on earth would Huawei need to hack us when they have administrative access to the network to begin with?

    6. Re:China doesn't know how innovate by Ryanrule · · Score: 1

      They are a small dick zero face culture.

    7. Re:China doesn't know how innovate by Kjella · · Score: 1

      It is not obvious to me that "after developing industry and copying technology" the next step is inevitable progression to original solutions. Do you have any evidence of anything being developed in-house in China that isn't copied?

      It borders on an ethnic insult to argue that 1.4 billion people are incapable of coming up with something original. Even though they're short on political freedom they have lots of bright scientists and engineers. Take high speed rail for example, they did import technology from France, Germany, Japan and Canada 15 years ago but it's now all in-house and they have 60%+ of the high speed rail in the world and 2+ billion customers per year. They have the world's longest HSR line, the world's fastest HSR line and the only commercially operating maglev line in the world. In short, they're market leaders by a huge margin. As much as /. is in love with SpaceX the Chinese actually launched more rockets in 2018 than the US did. Of course their rockets are much like existing rockets but it's not like they bought a design from Russia and called it theirs. But hey, it's only rocket science...

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  2. Why are there no consequences? by oic0 · · Score: 1

    So we are just going to spread our cheeks and invite them on in?

    1. Re:Why are there no consequences? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Consequences for China because someone does something, China gets blamed, and no evidence is shown?

      It's curious how these Iranian, North-Korean, Russian and Chinese hackers (or hackers from whatever country is currently on the agenda) always manage to leave their business cards behind them, isn't it? And there's always a "report" or "investigation" to inform the public about it, and then a stubborn denial to provide any evidence to the allegations.

      What you see here is not how Chinese intelligence works. This is how Western intelligence and propaganda works.