The Return to Normal?

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ayseven
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by ayseven »

Just to attempt to bring some common sense to this... it is difficult to fight a country that makes a large percentage of your goods that people want for next to nothing. The West built China by sending all the manufacturing there - the Chinese did not steal it. Now we have a problem with them. And it is a problem, because amongst the rhetoric and veiled racism is an element of truth, IN MY OPINION. I do not have an answer, and if I had one, nobody would listen.
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altiplano
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Re: The Return to Normal?

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ayseven wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2020 3:43 am Just to attempt to bring some common sense to this... it is difficult to fight a country that makes a large percentage of your goods that people want for next to nothing. The West built China by sending all the manufacturing there - the Chinese did not steal it. Now we have a problem with them. And it is a problem, because amongst the rhetoric and veiled racism is an element of truth, IN MY OPINION. I do not have an answer, and if I had one, nobody would listen.
Rhetoric and veiled racism? How so?

They didn't steal it all, just most of it - and they are coming for a whole lot more.

Where China's "Crown Jewel" Huawei came from
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424 ... 2201577054

Chinese Hackers Suspected In Long-Term Nortel Breach

By Siobhan Gorman
February 14, 2012


For nearly a decade, hackers enjoyed widespread access to the corporate computer network of Nortel Networks Ltd., a once-giant telecommunications firm now fallen on hard times.


Brian Shields, pictured, said hackers 'had access to everything.'
TRAVIS DOVE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Using seven passwords stolen from top Nortel executives, including the chief executive, the hackers—who appeared to be working in China—penetrated Nortel's computers at least as far back as 2000 and over the years downloaded technical papers, research-and-development reports, business plans, employee emails and other documents, according to Brian Shields, a former 19-year Nortel veteran who led an internal investigation.

The hackers also hid spying software so deeply within some employees' computers that it took investigators years to realize the pervasiveness of the problem, according to Mr. Shields and Nortel documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. They "had access to everything," Mr. Shields said of the hackers. "They had plenty of time. All they had to do was figure out what they wanted."


According to an internal report, Nortel "did nothing from a security standpoint" to keep out the hackers, other than resetting the seven passwords.

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Nortel's breach offers a rare level of detail about a type of international corporate espionage that is of growing concern to U.S. officials. A U.S. intelligence report released in November concluded that hackers operating from China—both government-affiliated and private-sector—are the world's most "active and persistent" perpetrators of industrial spying. The report cited a number of Chinese attacks, including one targeting Google ; the theft of data from global energy companies; and theft of proprietary data such as client lists and acquisition plans at other companies.

The Nortel revelations come as China's vice president, Xi Jinping, arrived in the U.S. for a visit in which China is seeking to promote greater trust between the two countries. Mr. Xi, who arrived Monday afternoon, likely will press the U.S. to expand Chinese access to U.S. high-tech markets at a time when U.S. intelligence officials have expressed increasing alarm about what they say is government-sponsored cyberspying on U.S. and Western companies, particularly in China.


Nortel's then-CEO, Mike Zafirovski, said people 'did not believe it was a real issue.'
BLOOMBERG NEWS
China's government has denied allegations of cyberspying. When asked about Nortel specifically, the Chinese embassy in Washington issued a statement saying in part that "cyber attacks are transnational and anonymous" and shouldn't be assumed to originate in China "without thorough investigation and hard evidence."

Nortel didn't respond to requests for comment. The Canadian company is in the final stages of selling itself off in pieces as part of a 2009 bankruptcy filing.

Nortel was a pioneering maker of the computerized switches and telecom gear that powers much of the world's phone and Internet networks. Nortel equipment (now part of a business owned by Genband Corp.) makes up 45% to 50% of the U.S. telephone switch marketplace, according to Akshay Sharma of research firm Gartner Inc.

As part of its internal investigation, Nortel made no effort to determine if its products were also compromised by hackers, according to several former employees including Mr. Shields, who was a senior adviser for systems security at Nortel. The investigation lasted about six months, and for some of that time involved three staffers, Mr. Shields said, before it fizzled out due to a lack of leads.

Mr. Shields and several former colleagues said the company didn't fix the hacking problem before starting to sell its assets, and didn't disclose the hacking to prospective buyers. Nortel assets have been purchased by Avaya Inc., Ciena Corp., Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson and Genband.

It is possible for companies to inherit spyware or hacker infiltrations via acquisitions, said Sean McGurk, who until recently ran the U.S. government's cybersecurity intelligence center. "When you're buying those files or that intellectual property, you're also buying that 'rootkit,'" he said, using a term that refers to embedded spy software.

Nortel's experience exposes the uncertainties in reporting requirements for company officials who discover that their networks are infiltrated. Companies aren't obligated to disclose a breach to another company as part of an acquisition deal, said Jacob Olcott of Good Harbor Consulting, a firm that advises companies on national-security issues. It is up to the acquiring company to ask, he said.

Since Nortel's stock traded publicly in the U.S., it was required by the Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose "material" risks and events to investors. Many companies are just now becoming aware that cyber attacks must be reported if considered material, said Mr. Olcott, a former Capitol Hill aide who led a committee investigation into public disclosure of incidents like these.

SELLING NORTEL
Buyers in bankruptcy include:

Ericsson: Purchased a range of wireless businesses from Nortel valued together at $1.4 billion
Avaya: Bought much of Nortel's business with the U.S. government, valued at $900 million
Genband: Acquired the firm's Internet-phone business and other assets, originally valued at around $182 million, though that total has been contested
Ciena: Now owns Nortel's highend networking business, valued at $769 million
Source: Gartner Inc.

As a result of that investigation, late last year the SEC issued a formal guidance memo saying cyber attacks can be "material." It also said companies are expected to investigate a breach to determine whether it is material.

A Ciena spokesman said, "Ciena was not made aware, whether during diligence or any other part of the bankruptcy-sale process, of any possible prior infiltration of the Nortel network by third parties." A spokesman for Avaya, which learned of the breach after its acquisition, said: "We are aware of this issue, reviewed it when brought to our attention and disposed of it to our satisfaction."

A Genband official declined to discuss security matters or to say whether Nortel disclosed the breach before the acquisition. An Ericsson spokeswoman said Ericsson's own network "has a robust security protocol and is constantly monitored." She said Nortel wasn't required to disclose the hacking because Ericsson purchased only selected Nortel assets, not the whole company or its internal network.

Two of Nortel's three former CEOs during the period of the hacking didn't respond to a request for comment. The third, Mike Zafirovski, said, "People who looked at [the hacking] did not believe it was a real issue. This never came up like, 'We have a real issue and we need to disclose to potential buyers of businesses.'"

Mr. Zafirovski said he didn't believe the infiltrations could be passed on to acquiring companies. "That's a real, real stretch," he said.

In interviews, three former Nortel information-technology employees disputed Mr. Zafirovski's position, pointing out that a significant number of people continued to use Nortel laptops and desktop computers after moving to Avaya and Genband and connected them to those companies' networks. One of the three said he knew with certainty that his machine wasn't tested for possible infiltration before it was connected to Avaya's network; he estimated the total number of similar machines to be "in the high hundreds."

Both companies declined to comment on Nortel machines being connected to their networks.

Mr. Shields said he believes Nortel's silence put the acquiring companies at risk. "It's despicable that Nortel didn't say anything," he said.

Nortel discovered the hacking in 2004, when an employee noticed that a senior executive appeared to be downloading an unusual set of documents, according to the internal report. When asked about it, the executive said he hadn't downloaded the documents.

Mr. Shields and a handful of the firm's computer-security officers soon learned that hackers had apparently obtained the passwords of seven top officials, including a previous CEO. The hackers had been infiltrating Nortel's network, from China-based Internet addresses, at least as early as 2000, Mr. Shields and his colleagues determined.

Hackers had almost complete access to the company's systems, Mr. Shields said, because the internal structure of Nortel's network posed few barriers. "Once you were on the inside of the network, it was soft and gooey," he said.

About six months later, Mr. Shields said, he saw signs that hackers were still in the system. Every month or so, a few computers on the network were sending small bursts of data to one of the same Internet addresses in Shanghai involved in the password-hacking episodes. Unexpected transmissions like these—where one computer sends a quick "ping" to another—often suggests the presence of spyware, security experts say.

"That's the really deep covert presence," said one person familiar with Nortel's investigation. "There is something on those computers that's doing that, and finding it is very difficult."

Mr. Shields said he suggested further steps to secure the network, but Nortel chose not to take the recommendations. "Our own internal process choked us all the time," he said.

In 2008, Mr. Shields said, he learned of a new kind of test, called a memory dump, he could run on PCs suspected of being infected. By this time, however, Nortel was in deep financial trouble. Cost-cutting layoffs had begun, the stock was tanking and top executives were desperately trying to pilot the company through a rapidly changing telecom industry. In January 2009, Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection.

In March of that year, Mr. Shields got approval to examine two of the 50 or so computers he had noticed occasionally communicating with the Shanghai Internet address. But within a couple of weeks, Mr. Shields himself was laid off—caught in the latest round of cost-cutting convulsing Nortel at the time. (Former supervisors confirm his layoff wasn't related to job performance.)

The day after he left Nortel, Mr. Shields said, he received the test results for the two computers, which had previously gotten a clean bill of health from Nortel's antivirus experts. Hackers had installed spyware on the computers and could control them remotely. The hackers were also monitoring employee email, Mr. Shields said.

The spyware unearthed in 2009 was a sophisticated mix. On both computers, researchers found a particularly malicious and hard-to-spot spying tool, namely "rootkit" software that can give a hacker full control over a computer and enables them to conceal their spying campaign, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

On one computer, hackers had set up an encrypted communications channel to an Internet address near Beijing. On the other computer, the investigators found a program that hackers were likely using to sniff out other security weaknesses within Nortel's networks. The hackers had created a "reliable back door," according to one person familiar with the investigation, allowing them to come and go as they pleased in Nortel's network.

Five former Nortel employees familiar with the investigation said the company did nothing with the new information Mr. Shields had collected. "It was blown off," one said.

Soon after, Mr. Shields was hired back as a consultant to another part of the company. In June 2009, he sent a 15-page report, detailing the infiltrations spanning nearly a decade, to Mr. Zafirovski, the then-CEO.

"The Chinese are still in your network, we never really rid them out," Mr. Shields wrote. "I personally would not trust anything you do on your computer as it is extremely likely it is being monitored."

Mr. Zafirovski said he didn't recall the report. He said some security managers have told him Mr. Shields had a reputation as someone who was smart, but would also "cry wolf."

At that point, Nortel's focus was on selling assets, not assessing possible hacker damage, former employees said. In July 2009, Nortel began inking deals that ultimately totaled $1.4 billion in sales of a range of wireless businesses to Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company. In December, in a $900 million deal with U.S.-based Avaya, Nortel sold off a business that included much of its work with the U.S. government.

In February 2010, Nortel sold its Internet-phone business and other assets to U.S.-based Genband. The following month, it sold its high-end communications-networking business to U.S.-based Ciena for $769 million, according to Gartner data.

After Avaya's acquisition of Nortel businesses, Mr. Shields shared his report on the infiltrations with a security official at Avaya. This was the first time the company learned of Nortel's intrusion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A top U.S. intelligence official said Nortel's hacking experience is representative of the types of incidents he sees. "That is consistent with what we've seen in long-term, multipronged attacks," he said. "If I'm looking to get a jump on my R&D, that's a good way to do it."

Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com
Undermining democracies

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/worl ... -zhao.html

The New York Times
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NEWS ANALYSIS

Suddenly, the Chinese Threat to Australia Seems Very Real
After a businessman said Chinese agents sought to implant him in Parliament, that revelation and other espionage cases have finally signaled the end of a “let’s get rich together” era.

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Chinese tourists taking photographs outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, in January.
Chinese tourists taking photographs outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, in January.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
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By Damien Cave and Jamie Tarabay
Nov. 28, 2019
CANBERRA, Australia — A Chinese defector to Australia who detailed political interference by Beijing. A businessman found dead after telling the authorities about a Chinese plot to install him in Parliament. Suspicious men following critics of Beijing in major Australian cities.

For a country that just wants calm commerce with China — the propellant behind 28 years of steady growth — the revelations of the past week have delivered a jolt.

Fears of Chinese interference once seemed to hover indistinctly over Australia. Now, Beijing’s political ambitions, and the espionage operations that further them, suddenly feel local, concrete and ever-present.

“It’s become the inescapable issue,” said Hugh White, a former intelligence official who teaches strategic studies at the Australian National University. “We’ve underestimated how quickly China’s power has grown along with its ambition to use that power.”

American officials often describe Australia as a test case, the ally close enough to Beijing to see what could be coming for others.

In public and in private, they’ve pushed Australia’s leaders to confront China more directly — pressure that may only grow after President Trump signed legislation to impose sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials over human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

Image
A rally last month in Hong Kong in support of a bill in the American Congress.
A rally last month in Hong Kong in support of a bill in the American Congress.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Even as it confronts the specter of brazen espionage, Australia’s government has yet to draw clear boundaries for an autocratic giant that is both an economic partner and a threat to freedom, a conundrum faced by many countries, but more acutely by Australia.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison continues to insist that Australia need not choose between China and the United States. A new foreign interference law has barely been enforced, and secrecy is so ingrained that even lawmakers and experts lack the in-depth information they need.

As a result, the country’s intelligence agencies have raised alarms about China in ways that most Australian politicians avoid. The agencies have never been flush with expertise on China, including Chinese speakers, yet they are now in charge of disentangling complex claims of nefarious deeds, all vigorously denied by China.

In the most troubling recent case, first reported by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Australian authorities have confirmed that they are investigating accusations made by Nick Zhao, an Australian businessman who told intelligence officials that he had been the target of a plot to install him in Parliament as a Chinese agent.

Mr. Zhao, a 32-year-old luxury car dealer, was a member of his local Liberal Party branch. He was a “perfect target for cultivation,” according to Andrew Hastie, a federal lawmaker and tough critic of Beijing who was briefed on the case.


He told The Age that Mr. Zhao was “a bit of a high-roller in Melbourne, living beyond his means.”

Another businessman with ties to the Chinese government, Mr. Zhao said, offered to provide a million Australian dollars ($677,000) to finance his election campaign for Parliament. But a few months later, in March, Mr. Zhao was found dead in a hotel room. The state’s coroner is investigating the cause of death.

In a rare statement, Mike Burgess, the head of Australia’s domestic spy agency, said on Monday that his organization was aware of Mr. Zhao’s case and was taking it very seriously.

The Chinese government, however, called the accusations a sign of Australian hysteria.

“Stories like ‘Chinese espionage’ or ‘China’s infiltration in Australia,’ with however bizarre plots and eye-catching details, are nothing but lies,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, said at a regular news briefing on Monday.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang.Credit...Andy Wong/Associated Press
Beijing has similarly dismissed the case that emerged last week, which involves a young asylum seeker named Wang Liqiang.


Mr. Wang presented himself to the Australian authorities as an important intelligence asset — an assistant to a Hong Kong businessman who Mr. Wang says is responsible for spying, propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed at quashing dissent in Hong Kong and undermining democracy in Taiwan.

China asserts that he is simply a convicted swindler. On Thursday, a Communist Party tabloid, The Global Times, released video of what it said was Mr. Wang’s 2016 trial on fraud charges, where a young man confessed to bilking someone out of $17,000.

Xiang Xin, the man Mr. Wang identified as his former boss, has denied having anything to do with him, or even knowing him.


The challenge of the case is just beginning. While some analysts have raised doubts about Mr. Wang’s assertions, elements in the detailed 17-page account that he gave to the authorities as part of an asylum application are being taken seriously by law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice detained Mr. Xiang and another executive with the company Mr. Wang said he worked for, China Innovation Investment Limited. Investigators in Taiwan are looking into assertions that their business acted on behalf of Chinese intelligence agencies.

Other details in Mr. Wang’s account — about the kidnapping of booksellers in Hong Kong, spying on Hong Kong university students, and the theft of military technology from the United States — are still being examined by Australian officials.

“Australia’s peak intelligence agencies are being put to the test,” said John Fitzgerald, a China specialist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. “It’s a tough call, and they cannot afford to get it wrong.”

Questions of loyalty continue to swirl around a Liberal Party member of Parliament, Gladys Liu.
Questions of loyalty continue to swirl around a Liberal Party member of Parliament, Gladys Liu.Credit...Lukas Coch/EPA, via Shutterstock
What’s clear, though, is that they are helping to push the public away from supporting cozy relations. Polls showed a hardening of Australian attitudes about China even before the past week.

Now Mr. Hastie, the China hawk and Liberal Party lawmaker who chairs Parliament’s joint intelligence committee, says his office has been overwhelmed by people across the country who have emailed, called and even sent handwritten letters expressing outrage and anxiety about China’s actions in Australia.

Questions of loyalty continue to swirl around another Liberal Party member of Parliament, Gladys Liu, who fumbled responses to questions in September about her membership in various groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party.


Pro-China students shouting at pro-Hong Kong protesters outside the University of South Australia in Adelaide in August.
Pro-China students shouting at pro-Hong Kong protesters outside the University of South Australia in Adelaide in August.Credit...Kelly Barnes/EPA, via Shutterstock
The espionage cases also follow several months of rising tensions at Australian universities, where protests by students from Hong Kong have been disrupted, sometimes with violence, by opponents from the Chinese mainland.

Several student activists have told the authorities that they have been followed or photographed by people who appear to be associated with the Chinese Consulate.

It has even happened to at least one high-profile former official, John Garnaut. A longtime journalist who produced a classified report on Chinese interference for former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, he recently acknowledged publicly that he had been stalked by people who appeared to be Chinese agents — in some cases when he was with his family.

These actions of apparent aggression point to a version of China that Australians hardly know. For decades, Australia has based its relations with Beijing on a simple idea: Let’s get rich together. And the mining companies that are especially close to Mr. Morrison’s conservative government have been the biggest winners.

But now more than ever, the country is seeing that for the Communist Party under President Xi Jinping, it’s no longer just about wealth and trade.

“The transactions aren’t satisfying them enough; they want more,” said John Blaxland, a professor of international security and intelligence studies at the Australian National University. “They want to gain influence over decisions about the further involvement of the United States, about further protestations to Chinese actions in the South China Sea, in the South Pacific, in Taiwan.”

Mr. Blaxland, along with American officials, often points out that Australia’s biggest export to China, iron ore, is hard to obtain elsewhere reliably and at the prices Australia’s companies charge. That suggests that the country has more leverage than its leaders might think.

Mr. Hastie, who was recently denied a visa to travel to China as part of a study group that included other members of Parliament, agreed. In an interview, he said the recent revelations were “the first time the Australian public has a concrete example of what we are facing.”

Now, he added, it’s time to adapt.
Wide spread GOVERNMENT sponsored IP theft
How China's Night Dragon cyber army has infiltrated every corner of Britain: Forget Edward Snowden... a chilling new book by the BBC's top security expert lays bare the biggest internet hack in history
By Gordon Corera For The Mail On Sunday
22:02 06 Jun 2015, updated 10:36 07 Jun 2015

Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole secrets from the West
Code-named Titan Rain, it is the biggest cyber espionage hack in history
Elite group of hackers plundered secrets from 141 companies in the West
Back in May 2004, Shawn Carpenter, a computer intrusion expert at Sandia National Laboratories – which work on the USA's nuclear weapons programme – began investigating a cyber security breach.

He had seen similar attacks on defence giant Lockheed Martin, which controls Sandia. Whoever was behind them was good – grabbing what they wanted in moments and always leaving a backdoor open so they could return.

Carpenter used a technique called 'back-hacking' to pursue the attackers online, all the way through Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea where they stashed their stolen files to their source – Guangdong in southern China.


Titan Rain - the biggest cyber espionage campaign in history - allowed China to plunder priceless military and commercial secrets from the West
Carpenter installed code on the hackers' machine which sent an email every time they were active. Two weeks later, he had 23,000 messages. This was much more than one individual. It was a huge team working all hours.

Carpenter had uncovered Titan Rain – the biggest cyber espionage campaign in history, and part of a programme which allowed China to plunder priceless military and commercial secrets from the West.

Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole secrets ranging from America's stealth bomber blueprints and Coca-Cola's business strategy to British Government briefings and BP geological reports.


Titan Rain's reach was vast. Terabytes of data on the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter had been stolen from companies including BAE.

There were at least 500 significant intrusions into the US military. The blueprints for planes, space-based lasers, missile navigation and nuclear submarines had all been stolen. One American said there was not a defence contractor that had not been penetrated.

And it was not just America. An email arrived in the London inbox of a Foreign Office diplomat in October 2003 purporting to come from a Tibetan group campaigning for autonomy from China. An attachment hid a malicious Trojan horse virus that allowed access to parts of the Foreign Office network.


Special units of the People's Liberation Army stole military and commercial secrets from the West
Never revealed before, this was the first serious known intrusion into British Government systems. Officials won't name who they think was responsible, but the email came from Beijing.


The more analysts began to look, the more they found. Britain's cyber security watchdog at the time, the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC), warned in June 2005 that the Government and nearly 300 critical businesses – in defence, telecoms and national security – had been hit. But the Foreign Office forbade it from mentioning China for fear of the diplomatic impact.


At the same time a vast Chinese company – which the US had kept out for fear of espionage – was entering into the heart of Britain's technological infrastructure. Fears that it could be a secret information gateway to Beijing led to a secret centre being set up in Oxfordshire to make sure our network remains secure.

Old-school espionage involved breaking into an office to steal files, but modern spying has adapted. The first step is emailing someone at the target organisation, perhaps posing as a colleague, and tricking them into downloading an attachment that allows hackers into the system.

One specialist will search for likely targets, another remotely copies and removes files to an anonymous electronic 'safe house'. Information is then retrieved by spies in Shanghai, Moscow, Tel Aviv or even Cheltenham, home to GCHQ.

The beauty is that this can be done from the other side of the world – and if you are lucky, no one will ever know you were there.

The most notorious group of cyber-spies was code-named APT1 – investigators found evidence of them in the systems of 141 companies in the English-speaking world.

Once inside, APT1 hackers stayed for an average of 356 days – and in one case roamed for a remarkable four years and ten months.

A new drug or aircraft engine costing millions in research can be siphoned off in a few moments.

Western experts started talking about heavily protected Chinese research institutes and the companies linked to them suddenly making huge leaps forward. US experts point out that China achieved the advanced skill of making a submarine move quietly far faster than the US or Russia.


The Chinese J-20 stealth aircraft arrived around a decade after Chinese hackers compromised a US research facility. And when Coca-Cola was negotiating the multi-billion-dollar purchase of a Chinese company, the APT1 group is believed to have got hold of its negotiating strategy. The bid failed.

A different campaign by a group called Night Dragon targeted BP, Shell and Exxon in search of highly valuable geological data about gas and oil prospects – gold-dust to resource-hungry China.

The language was apocalyptic: 'The greatest transfer of wealth in history' is how Keith Alexander, then-director of America's National Security Agency, described cyber espionage in 2012. Others feared as much as a trillion dollars worth of damage. But by following the data trail left by APT1, investigators tracked them to a door in a down- at-heel part of Shanghai that housed Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army. Inside, hundreds worked in a 130,000 sq ft building.

One blog posting by a 25-year-old hacker described a world of long hours, low pay and boredom. He wore a uniform but lived in a dorm and had little time for anything other than work or surfing the internet. 'I want to escape,' he wrote.

GCHQ and the NSA spied on the spies, remotely switching on the webcam of an attacker's computer to see them at work. In 2014, the US Department of Justice took the unprecedented step of charging five members of PLA 61398 with hacking. The FBI issued 'Cyber's Most Wanted' posters featuring photos of the hackers, including one who used the pseudonym UglyGorilla. In a deliberately provocative move, two were pictured in PLA uniform.

Meanwhile, Western companies rarely admit they have been breached. Such an admission would hit the share price straight away, while the actual cost in terms of intellectual property theft may not become apparent for years. By then, directors will almost certainly have moved on, their bonuses intact. But the final cost can be immense.

In 2004, a British employee of the Canadian telecoms giant Nortel became curious about a senior executive downloading documents connected with his work. When he emailed to offer help, the executive replied tersely: 'I don't know what you are talking about.'


Keith Alexander, the then-director of America's National Security Agency, said it was 'the greatest transfer of wealth in history'
Nortel alerted security expert Brian Shields, who found hackers had used the accounts of seven executives in Canada to send more than 1,500 documents to China over the previous six months – with evidence of theft going back to 2000. Shields was already aware of the threat – Nortel had been trying to get into the Chinese market since the 1990s when concerns became immediately apparent. One executive suspected his faxes were being monitored. Others had their luggage searched and laptops examined.

Shields was also part of the Network Security Information Exchange, bringing together governments and the private sector. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Cisco and British Telecom met the FBI, CIA, NSA and Britain's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) in Washington every other month.

Their discussions are classified, but there's little doubt they were dominated by the emergence of a large-scale, sophisticated Chinese threat. Shields reported back to his superiors that the Chinese were stealing everything: research and development, pricing and sales plans, customer information. At the time, Nortel was losing contracts to a new Chinese company, Huawei, which consistently bid 30 per cent less to do the same work.

It is impossible to blame cyber espionage for Nortel's decline and Huawei's rise – the company has come from nowhere to being perhaps the largest telecoms equipment company in the world, doing everything from selling smartphones to laying fibre-optic cables in the ocean.

Shields does not believe Huawei itself was hacking Nortel – he thinks the Chinese state was responsible. Yet the result was the same – Nortel began to fall apart. Shields lost his job to cost-cutting, but not before drafting a 15-page letter to the chief executive: 'I am certain the Chinese are inside Nortel's network,' he wrote. 'They have free rein to take whatever they want and have for a long time… unfair Chinese competition is running this company out of existence.'

It was too late. In January 2009, Nortel – which employed 90,000 worldwide and once made up a third of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange – filed for bankruptcy.

In Britain, spies faced a new headache within months of the rogue Tibetan email to the Foreign Office in 2003. Huawei was signing a major deal to work with BT and there was confusion in Westminster about what to do. Some warned of the dangers, but it was only after the deal was signed that concerns –reported in this newspaper – grew that China could use Huawei to spy on communications, or hit a 'kill switch' to turn them off completely.

On the third floor of a nondescript office in a business park in Banbury, Oxfordshire, two thick doors costing £30,000 each reveal that it is secured to 'List X' standard – and cleared to contain classified information.

The first door takes you into a room reminiscent of most offices. Behind an everyday reception are a few cubicles where people tap quietly on laptops. But electronic equipment must be stored in lockers, passes swiped, and a PIN entered in order to go through the second door. This inner sanctum is Top Secret: and no one from China is allowed to enter unescorted.


Canadian telecoms giant Nortel contracts to a new Chinese company, Huawei (pictured), which consistently bid 30 per cent less to do the same work
The Cyber Security Evaluation Centre – or The Cell – is paid for by Huawei and is the front line in a global debate over computer security which pits China against America, with Britain in the middle. Fear of espionage has kept Huawei out of America's telecoms infrastructure. This is the place where Britain tries to ensure it has not made a mistake by letting it in.

The inner sanctum is where the telecoms kit Huawei plans to install in Britain is tested: its code analysed and hardware – mobile phone base stations and the like – taken apart, photographed and weighed in a search for modifications.

Further inside, there is a locked steel cage, monitored by CCTV, holding a single computer terminal. This is the company's most precious asset, the source code that runs its equipment. A one-way diode means the encrypted code can flow into the computer to be examined, but not out. A two-man rule operates, so a Chinese employee of the company has one half of the password to decrypt the material, a security-cleared Briton has the other.

Pictures from the CCTV are beamed to Shenzhen, home of Huawei's headquarters, a vast campus in a place that has gone from small border town to a metropolis of 15 million people in a generation.

Its network control centre looks like mission control at Nasa. Dozens of operators watch screens which display the flow of much of the world's communications. Nowhere is the sense more clear that Huawei is everywhere.

'When you walk around the Huawei campus, you are staring into China's future,' wrote one US diplomat. A visiting Western executive had a different thought: 'We're screwed.'

Huawei has always denied espionage and points out that being caught spying would be commercial suicide. The same would apply to hitting a kill switch.

Yet a document called the National Risk Register outlines what could happen to Britain if it did. A section, called 'transition to war', relates to the possibility of China shutting Britain down by switching off all Huawei kit (and it would not necessarily need the connivance of the company to do so). This could take down as much as half the British network for days.

Two years ago, Britain's Intelligence and Security Committee's report on Huawei was overshadowed by Edward Snowden's revelations about Western spying, which has dominated the debate over cyber spying ever since.

In the past few days, however, Washington revealed that the personal records of four million government employees had been stolen. The source of the cyber espionage, they suggested, was China.
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Eric Janson
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by Eric Janson »

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46096768

Pretty obvious who's behind this. Australia is waking up but they have a huge problem.

China has bought a lot of assets in Australia.There are finally questions being asked.
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ayseven
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by ayseven »

For a buyer to buy, a seller has to want to sell. We have been all too happy to buy and sell from these people. We built China up. And Now people think we have a problem. And we do.
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altiplano
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by altiplano »

It was always build them up and the people will see and take the path to democracy. Unfortunately the people attribute their success to the CCP and blindly follow with their allegiance.

Stoking border conflicts in India now, mass state hackings against our allies, official charges brought against the kidnapped Canadians to be paraded in front of their corrupt judiciary, Hong Kong plunging further into darkness... when will the civilized world say "enough"?

Deal with the devil is what any continuing Western engagement with China is.
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ayseven
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by ayseven »

The west is always naive with the communists; they do what they have always done, and democracy is not something they understand. Look how fragile it is in the States right now. So getting a billion people to change course just because they learned how to make things for us, is not happening, obviously. The Russians wouldn't go for it, either, and before the communists, the Romanovs were violent thugs. Their histories are very long; much longer than ours, and a few overtures from our end just doesn't seem to work. Sanctions if we don't get the Michaels back? Then what are we looking at? Canada is a drop in the bucket. They will just come and take us by force if they really have to; they want what we have in the ground. Diplomacy is all we have, and being a bit more vigilant on the high tech spying, and obvious resource grabs would be a nice start.

If you look in the mirror, our own history is not great either. There were a lot of strikers shot by the authorities not too long ago, all over this country. So China is not even close to being where we were 100 years ago, because even then, we had SOME democracy (even though women couldn't vote) and they ain't changing overnight. Their political evolution has been completely different. I am trying to figure out why the UK let Hong Kong go so easily. Those poor people are certainly tough, but are in for it unfortunately.

Altiplano: I apologise for the veiled racism comment, but that is what it can sound like. I completely agree with your last post. Unfortunately, I, like everyone else, just has to have cheap stuff. In my own defence, I purposely bought a David Clark headset recently, because it was made in the States, by a family business. Please join with me in patting me on the back.
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2R
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by 2R »

ayseven wrote: Sat Jun 20, 2020 3:06 pm
If you look in the mirror, our own history is not great either. There were a lot of strikers shot by the authorities not too long ago, all over this country.

I am trying to figure out why the UK let Hong Kong go so easily.
When and where did those striker shootings happen ?

Hong Kong leaders voted to rejoin the Motherland and get rid of the Colonial powers , I worked with some guys from Hong Kong in 1995 who were very happy about celebrating their new freedoms .
There were upset when I said enjoy them , when the Japanese come back you can fight them yourselves for your freedom . Nobody in 1997 thought their Motherland would be so quick to break their agreements made with the British and the Americans who thought they would be-able to use Aberdeen Harbour after the Royal Navy left .

I wonder what Peter and Arthur would think now about their trust and naivety In broken promises .
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ayseven
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by ayseven »

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FL101
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by FL101 »

Britain let Hong Kong go because Britain had no choice. China wanted it and the UK wasn’t willing or able to fight for it.

Everyone knew the 50 year agreement of 2 system rule wasn’t going to fly, but no one expected it to be over this soon.
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ayseven
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by ayseven »

Well, my point was that the Chinese government can, and has, done whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and we should be perhaps annoyed, but not shocked.
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altiplano
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by altiplano »

I'd go DC too.

Support made in the West or Japan or ABC (anywhere but China).
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Inverted2
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by Inverted2 »

It’s hard to avoid buying Chinese garbage. I try.
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Eric Janson
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by Eric Janson »

Here's what things look like for some us:-

I volunteered for an operation my Airline has on the other side of the World.

We had to get special Visas to allow us to enter the country.

Crew presently in the country have been trapped as there were no flights to get them home. We arrived with a second aircraft and 60 crew to relieve them. Cabin crew have been in the country for 7 months and 3 months for flight crew.

We were told to plan to be away for 2 months.

On arrival we went into 14 day Quarantine in the apartments we stay at. We are not even allowed out of the room! All meals are delivered to the door.

Today I am positioning to another location. This crosses a state border so the 14 day Quarantine resets!

In 8 days I do a flight that leaves the country and returns 2 days later. Another reset of the 14 day Quarantine!

Looking at my July roster it appears to be permanent Quarantine with a few flights.

We're still very far from returning to normal imho.
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CPT.HarshColdReality
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by CPT.HarshColdReality »

what kind of operation does not disqualify crews from isolation rules. From what I understand most countries do no include flight crews in the quarantine/isolation rules. USA and Canada alike....
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Launchpad1
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by Launchpad1 »

I am trying to figure out why the UK let Hong Kong go so easily. Those poor people are certainly tough, but are in for it unfortunately.
We gave back Hong Kong because what choice did we have.

In the 80's we had to stop Argentina from taking over the Falklands Islands. That was hard enough and took a large effort from the UK at a time when our fleet was still reasonably large. Can you imagine trying to stop China in the 90's from taking over Hong Kong.

It was a shame for the HK people though. They went from being part of a democratic society to being part of a communist one.
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photofly
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by photofly »

FL101 wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 5:28 am Britain let Hong Kong go because Britain had no choice. China wanted it and the UK wasn’t willing or able to fight for it.
Hong Kong returned to Chinese jurisdiction because the lease was up. Quite literally. It wasn’t a voluntary matter, and it wasn’t something that could be fought, like Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands could be fought. Britain bought a 99 year lease to the territory in 1898, and the Chinese didn’t want to renew it. The territory was always Chinese.

In 1997 most of the economic value of HK was as a financial centre; the two-systems was agreed by the Chinese so that HK wouldn’t drop to zero economic value with the cessation of free trade and the overnight introduction of communism when China took over.
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DId you hear the one about the jurisprudence fetishist? He got off on a technicality.
Launchpad1
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by Launchpad1 »

Hong Kong returned to Chinese jurisdiction because the lease was up.
I might be wrong but I don't believe that's correct. It was only the New Territories that were leased to the UK. Hong Kong Island itself was actually ceded to the UK and owned outright by the UK.
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ted_stryker
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by ted_stryker »

Launchpad1 wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 6:45 pm
Hong Kong returned to Chinese jurisdiction because the lease was up.
I might be wrong but I don't believe that's correct. It was only the New Territories that were leased to the UK. Hong Kong Island itself was actually ceded to the UK and owned outright by the UK.

You are correct
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pelmet
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by pelmet »

ted_stryker wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 7:39 pm
Launchpad1 wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 6:45 pm Hong Kong returned to Chinese jurisdiction because the lease was up.
I might be wrong but I don't believe that's correct. It was only the New Territories that were leased to the UK. Hong Kong Island itself was actually ceded to the UK and owned outright by the UK.


I have heard that too and that the UK felt that Hong Kong itself would be too small to be viable without the New Territories.
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Last edited by pelmet on Wed Jun 24, 2020 5:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
pelmet
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Re: The Return to Normal?

Post by pelmet »

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