May 19, 2013
Chinese Hackers Resume Attacks on U.S. Targets
By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/world/asia/chinese-hackers-resume-attacks-on-us-targets.html
WASHINGTON — Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of
China’s People’s Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had
stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies,
they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques,
according to computer industry security experts and American officials.
The Obama administration had bet that “naming and shaming” the groups,
first in industry reports and then in the Pentagon’s own detailed survey
of Chinese military capabilities, might prompt China’s new leadership to
crack down on the military’s highly organized team of hackers — or at
least urge them to become more subtle.
But Unit 61398, whose well-guarded 12-story white headquarters on the
edges of Shanghai became the symbol of Chinese cyberpower, is back in
business, according to American officials and security companies.
It is not clear precisely who has been affected by the latest attacks.
Mandiant, a private security company that helps companies and government
agencies defend themselves from hackers, said the attacks had resumed
but would not identify the targets, citing agreements with its clients.
But it did say the victims were many of the same ones the unit had
attacked before.
The hackers were behind scores of thefts of intellectual property and
government documents over the past five years, according to a report by
Mandiant in February that was confirmed by American officials. They have
stolen product blueprints, manufacturing plans, clinical trial results,
pricing documents, negotiation strategies and other proprietary
information from more than 100 of Mandiant’s clients, predominantly in
the United States.
According to security experts, the cyberunit was responsible for a 2009
attack on the Coca-Cola Company that coincided with its failed attempt
to acquire the China Huiyuan Juice Group. In 2011, it attacked RSA, a
maker of data security products used by American government agencies and
defense contractors, and used the information it collected from that
attack to break into the computer systems of Lockheed Martin, the
aerospace contractor.
More recently, security experts said, the group took aim at companies
with access to the nation’s power grid. Last September, it broke into
the Canadian arm of Telvent, now Schneider Electric, which keeps
detailed blueprints on more than half the oil and gas pipelines in North
America.
Representatives of Coca-Cola and Schneider Electric did not return
requests for comment on Sunday. A Lockheed Martin spokesman said the
company declined to comment.
In interviews, Obama administration officials said they were not
surprised by the resumption of the hacking activity. One senior official
said Friday that “this is something we are going to have to come back at
time and again with the Chinese leadership,” who, he said, “have to be
convinced there is a real cost to this kind of activity.”
Mandiant said that the Chinese hackers had stopped their attacks after
they were exposed in February and removed their spying tools from the
organizations they had infiltrated. But over the past two months, they
have gradually begun attacking the same victims from new servers and
have reinserted many of the tools that enable them to seek out data
without detection. They are now operating at 60 percent to 70 percent of
the level they were working at before, according to a study by Mandiant
requested by The New York Times.
The Times hired Mandiant to investigate an attack that originated in
China on its news operations last fall. Mandiant is not currently
working for The New York Times Company.
Mandiant’s findings match those of Crowdstrike, another security company
that has also been tracking the group. Adam Meyers, director of
intelligence at Crowdstrike, said that apart from a few minor changes in
tactics, it was “business as usual” for the Chinese hackers.
The subject of Chinese attacks is expected to be a central issue in an
upcoming visit to China by President Obama’s national security adviser,
Thomas Donilon, who has said that dealing with China’s actions in
cyberspace is now moving to the center of the complex security and
economic relationship between the two countries.
But hopes for progress on the issue are limited. When the Pentagon
released its report this month officially identifying the Chinese
military as the source of years of attacks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry
denied the accusation, and People’s Daily, which reflects the views of
the Communist Party, called the United States “the real ‘hacking
empire,’ ” saying it “has continued to strengthen its network tools for
political subversion against other countries.” Other Chinese
organizations and scholars cited American and Israeli cyberattacks on
Iran’s nuclear facilities as evidence of American hypocrisy.
At the White House, Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National
Security Council, said Sunday that “what we have been seeking from China
is for it to investigate our concerns and to start a dialogue with us on
cyberissues.” She noted that China “agreed last month to start a new
working group,” and that the administration hoped to win “longer-term
changes in China’s behavior, including by working together to establish
norms against the theft of trade secrets and confidential business
information.”
In a report to be issued Wednesday, a private task force led by Mr.
Obama’s former director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, and
his former ambassador to China, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., lays out a series
of proposed executive actions and Congressional legislation intended to
raise the stakes for China.
“Jawboning alone won’t work,” Mr. Blair said Saturday. “Something has to
change China’s calculus.”
The exposure of Unit 61398’s actions, which have long been well known to
American intelligence agencies, did not accomplish that task.
One day after Mandiant and the United States government revealed the
P.L.A. unit as the culprit behind hundreds of attacks on agencies and
companies, the unit began a haphazard cleanup operation, Mandiant said.
Attack tools were unplugged from victims’ systems. Command and control
servers went silent. And of the 3,000 technical indicators Mandiant
identified in its initial report, only a sliver kept operating. Some of
the unit’s most visible operatives, hackers with names like “DOTA,”
“SuperHard” and “UglyGorilla,” disappeared, as cybersleuths scoured the
Internet for clues to their real identities.
In the case of UglyGorilla, Web sleuths found digital evidence that
linked him to a Chinese national named Wang Dong, who kept a blog about
his experience as a P.L.A. hacker from 2006 to 2009, in which he
lamented his low pay, long hours and instant ramen meals.
But in the weeks that followed, the group picked up where it had left
off. From its Shanghai headquarters, the unit’s hackers set up new
beachheads from compromised computers all over the world, many of them
small Internet service providers and mom-and-pop shops whose owners do
not realize that by failing to rigorously apply software patches for
known threats, they are enabling state-sponsored espionage.
“They dialed it back for a little while, though other groups that also
wear uniforms didn’t even bother to do that,” Kevin Mandia, the chief
executive of Mandiant, said in an interview on Friday. “I think you have
to view this as the new normal.”
The hackers now use the same malicious software they used to break into
the same organizations in the past, only with minor modifications to the
code.
While American officials and corporate executives say they are trying to
persuade President Xi Jinping’s government that a pattern of theft by
the P.L.A. will damage China’s growth prospects — and the willingness of
companies to invest in China — their longer-term concern is that China
may be trying to establish a new set of rules for Internet commerce,
with more censorship and fewer penalties for the theft of intellectual
property.
Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, said Friday that while there was
evidence that inside China many citizens are using the Web to pressure
the government to clean up industrial hazards or to complain about
corruption, “so far there is no positive data on China’s dealings with
the rest of the world” on cyberissues.
Google largely pulled out of China after repeated attacks on its systems
in 2009 and 2010, and now has its Chinese operations in Hong Kong. But
it remains, Mr. Schmidt said, a constant target for Chinese cyberattackers.
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