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An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

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Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#31

Post by plagiarist »

rdtsc wrote: post #25
viccis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A good non-NSA agency should also learn from this to be able to effectively false-flag as NSA It seems like such a lapse in tradecraft that, absent other indicators, I would just assume it's a crude false flag attempt.

It's a Schrödinger's false-flag! Just incompetent enough to look like a false flag. But at the same time, it's coming from the heart of US bureaucracy, which finds cash to build multi-billion dollar hidden data centers, but is also inflexible enough properly pay for overtime and off-schedule work.

I don't find the money inexplicable at all. Building multi-billion dollar data centers increases wealth for billionaires but paying overtime would benefit a middle-class pleb.

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#32

Post by inetknght »

vednig wrote: post #7
rdtsc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can I comment freely here Sure, we all have the freedom of speech here. Will you have freedom after speech though, I don't know? It depends on your particular situation ;-)

nothing it's just two biggest intelligence agencies fighting, I think keeping quiet is the safest bet

Sometimes keeping quiet isn't the best form of defense though.

So it really does depend on your situation.

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#33

Post by Mountain_Skies »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #30

Given how US is attacking their enemies and at times their allies, 24/7 it is amazing how little we ever hear about it.

If we were in Russia or China, we'd likely hear about US actions in this area quite a bit more. With allies, well, there's a lot of mutual back scrubbing going on.

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#34

Post by nonrandomstring »

viccis wrote: post #19
rdtsc wrote: post #4

> No attacks occurred during Memorial Day and Independence Day holidays which were unique American holidays. Simple but effective. A good non-NSA agency should also learn from this to be able to effectively false-flag as NSA, as long as they are flexible enough to allow off-hours and overtime pay and remember to respect the US federal holidays. > Two zero-days were used to breach any company with SunOS-exposed system…

>A good non-NSA agency should also learn from this to be able to effectively false-flag as NSA It seems like such a lapse in tradecraft that, absent other indicators, I would just assume it's a crude false flag attempt.

Wasn't one of the curiosities in Snowden vault7 an "attribution engineering toolkit"? That sounds quite flexible.

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#35

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #30

Given how US is attacking their enemies and at times their allies, 24/7 it is amazing how little we ever hear about it.

Regarding unwarranted surveillance of Americans not suspected of a crime (and by extension, our allies):

Throughout my longish life, these things have not changed.

~All federal politicians support/expand it and then obfuscate their part.

News orgs don't/won't cover it (most of the time). The reason is every possible reason. Stated differently: Reluctance is a forgone conclusion; every editor/journalist has their own why.

There is an excess of voters who compulsively give Gov the benefit of the doubt. At least where Gov favors it's interests over ours. (modern version: Where Gov acts in good faith and places our interest first, wound-up voters endlessly crap all over that [because agendas].)

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#36

Post by markus_zhang »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #30

Given how US is attacking their enemies and at times their allies, 24/7 it is amazing how little we ever hear about it.

China did publish some information once for a while. But the information is usually in Chinese and lacking details.

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#37

Post by runjake »

rdtsc wrote: post #4

> No attacks occurred during Memorial Day and Independence Day holidays which were unique American holidays. Simple but effective. A good non-NSA agency should also learn from this to be able to effectively false-flag as NSA, as long as they are flexible enough to allow off-hours and overtime pay and remember to respect the US federal holidays. > Two zero-days were used to breach any company with SunOS-exposed system…

  *> A good non-NSA agency should also learn from this to be able to effectively false-flag as NSA*
For what it's worth, this is already a TTP used domestically, as well as by our adversaries (and allies, eg GCHQ and 8200).

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#38

Post by EvanAnderson »

vlovich123 wrote: post #26
kokx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The type of work the people working at an APT do, is mainly office work, while it still is very much "hands-on-keyboard" work (so you cannot set an action to automatically occur when nobody is checking the results in the middle of the night). You might want to try shuffling this up when you are in charge, but your (usually highly skilled and expensive) employees probably don't want to be working weird shifts all the…

I have a hard time imagining these APT attacks are manual at the keyboard typing. That seems like an invention for entertainment whereas I'd expect reality to be "run script & establish an ongoing backdoor" or "run script & perform attack". You might need on-call to flag if anything has gone wrong, but I'd have a hard time imagining the entire team is involved for that so the cost of paying extra for an on-call is qu…

> I have a hard time imagining these APT attacks are manual at the keyboard typing.

(My perspective on this comes from doing security assessments and pentests 10+ years ago. Take that for what it's worth.)

I think of it a little bit like robotic vs. human space missions.

A robot can gather a ton of data without human intervention. It can perform repeated mindless activities. A certain amount of contingency against unforeseen issues can be engineered-in. Beyond the point of expected anomalies, though, the robot is going to fail (and perhaps expose your operation).

When it comes to reacting to rapidly changing mission conditions nothing beats a human in the loop. It's really hard to plan for all the peculiarities of any given environment. Intuition and experience play an immense role. Most of all, though, you may only get one shot before you're detected and stopped.

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#39

Post by actionfromafar »

plagiarist wrote: post #31
rdtsc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Schrödinger's false-flag! Just incompetent enough to look like a false flag. But at the same time, it's coming from the heart of US bureaucracy, which finds cash to build multi-billion dollar hidden data centers, but is also inflexible enough properly pay for overtime and off-schedule work.

I don't find the money inexplicable at all. Building multi-billion dollar data centers increases wealth for billionaires but paying overtime would benefit a middle-class pleb.

Well how convenient those plebs are down-sized right now.

Re: An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

#40

Post by thaumasiotes »

boston_clone wrote: post #20
thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

> These insights stem from extensive research I did on Weixin Someone doing extensive research on Weixin might ordinarily realize that it's called "Wechat" in English.

Wechat is the internationalized version; Weixin is for mainland China. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=weixin+vs+wechat

I guess if ChatGPT told you to glue the cheese onto your pizza, you'd eat it that way.

Wechat is also the mainland version. It's always been Wechat, and in particular it was Wechat years before they kicked me off of the mainland Chinese version† for registering an American phone number. The reality is exactly what I already told you: the app's name is 微信 in Chinese and Wechat in English. This is why coverage of Wechat's extensive market penetration in China always calls it "Wechat".

Don't believe everything you read in the results of the stupidest web search you know how to run. If you try facts, you might like them!

† By the way, "version" is really stretching things. There is no difference in the app. They don't keep your data within China, you go into a different advertising segment, and by default you connect to a different in-app sticker shop.

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