Tag Archive for: China’s

A long march: China’s military-industrial espionage

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This article is adapted from the authors’ new book, Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia are Undermining our Democracy and National Security (Prometheus, August 2023, available for preorder here).

Recent revelations that Chinese state-sponsored hackers penetrated US critical infrastructure and have the ability to disrupt oil and gas pipelines, rail systems, and the US Navy’s communications in the Pacific theater should come as no surprise. China’s pursuit of digital dominance has been decades in the making.

Reveille for China’s planners was sounded in the early 1990s during the Gulf War, in which the United States and its allies effortlessly toppled Iraqi forces. The first conflict of the digital era demonstrated to Chinese strategists the critical role of information technology on and off the battlefield.

Chinese leaders watched with dismay as the American military routed and dismantled the Iraqi military in what is considered one of the most one-sided conflicts in the history of modern warfare.

Going into the first Gulf War, Iraq’s military was ranked fourth in the world – having ballooned to more than a million troops who had been trained on weapons financed by the West to fight its bloody eight-year war with Iran.

The Chinese military, although larger in headcount at the time, paled in technological comparison with the forces commanded by Saddam Hussein. At the time, China’s air force consisted of a few fighter jets, mostly of its J-7 model – an indigenously produced replica of the Russian 1960s-era MiG-21.

Iraq’s air force, by contrast, was made up of far more advanced fighters, such as the Russian MiG-29, and its planes were supported by advanced antiaircraft missile defense systems. Yet even those advanced weapon systems proved wholly ineffective against 1990s-era American technology.

“The Chinese looked at Iraq and saw an army similarly equipped as theirs with old Soviet weaponry, and they saw how quickly the Iraqis were taken apart,” says analyst Scott Henderson of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant. Henderson was with the US Army at the time, specializing in China.

“A lot of the ease of victory had to do with the…

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What we know about China’s hacking of Navy systems

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Chinese-backed hackers breached American infrastructure, including technology systems belonging to the U.S. Navy, government officials confirmed this past week. 

Technology company Microsoft first reported on the hack, identifying the group and the techniques used to pull it off. The operation aimed to gain access to communications systems in the United States and U.S. Navy infrastructure on Guam. The island is home to several military installations, including a large contingent of B-52 bombers and U.S. Navy submarines. 

In response the United States and allies published a report on how to detect and protect against such intrusions. 

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Who is behind it?

Microsoft Corp. first reported the apparent hack on Wednesday, May 24. It identified the perpetrators with “moderate confidence” as Volt Typhoon, a “state-sponsored actor based in China that typically focuses on espionage and information gathering.” The group has been active since at least 2021.

This specific hack saw Volt Typhoon using legitimate credentials to gain access to the systems, getting inside and then using small-office routers to disguise where the intrusion is coming from. Cybersecurity experts call this approach “living off the land.” They obtained initial access by targeting Fortinet cybersecurity devices, taking advantage of a flaw in the system to gain credentials.

The Chinese government has denied the allegations, calling them a “collective disinformation campaign” by the countries that make up the Five Eyes intelligence sharing organization, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

What was affected?

The full extent of the hack is not clear, but the infrastructure targeted “span the communications, manufacturing, utility, transportation, construction, maritime, government, information technology, and education sectors,” Microsoft said. 

“Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that this Volt Typhoon campaign is pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the…

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Challenges facing China’s development of AI chatbots

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Since Baidu pioneered China’s homegrown development of ChatGPT-like AI chatbots with its Ernie Bot, several businesses have followed suit, including SenseTime’s SenseNova and Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen. Huawei also intends to release an upgraded…

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Google suspends China’s Pinduoduo app on security concerns

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March 21 (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google suspended the Play version of PDD Holdings Inc’s (PDD.O) Pinduoduo app for security concerns, after malware issues were found on versions of the Chinese e-commerce app outside Google’s app store, a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.

“Off-Play versions of this app that have been found to contain malware have been enforced on via Google Play Protect,” the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the Play version of the app has been suspended for security concerns.

Google Play Protect scans Android devices with Google Play Services for potentially harmful apps and works to prevent the installation of malicious apps.

“Google Play has informed us this morning that Pinduoduo App has been temporarily suspended as the current version is not compliant with Google’s Policy, but has not shared more details,” a Pinduoduo spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.

There are several other apps that have been suspended by Google Play, Pinduoduo said, adding that there are multiple reasons an app is temporarily suspended. Google did not immediately respond to a query on the suspension of other apps on the Play store.

PDD Holdings’ shares fell 1.8% in premarket trading on Tuesday.

The development comes amid efforts by the U.S. government to bolster its cyber defenses in the face of a steady increase in hacking and digital crimes targeting the country.

The government recently announced a new cybersecurity strategy that named China and Russia as the most prominent threats to the United States.

Reporting by Baranjot Kaur and Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Editing by Dhanya Ann Thoppil

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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