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Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

foreignpolicy.com

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Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#131

Post by edm0nd »

qaq wrote: post #75
yborg wrote: post #13

It took 8 years for the CIA to figure out what happened?? This certainly explains why China and Russia continue to conduct cyber operations basically at the same level of intensity they have been for years - US intelligence, despite its enormous, unaccountable budget is unable to stop them or even know where they are compromised. If there is an actual hot conflict between the US and either of these nations, I shudder…

For starters they can't really pay market salaries for the skills they need so to some degree this has more to do with laws on the books than with management and organizational failures.

That's why agencies like the FBl just raid people and then flip them into Confidential Human Sources (CHS). They dont have to pay them anything and use the threat of jail time in exchange for skills/information.

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#132

Post by secfirstmd »

mikec3010 wrote: post #102

I'm surprised they didn't do something truly clandestine like embed encrypted texts into photos of merchandise and list them on amazon/alibaba

There was someone at a high profile defence company using Amazon.com to communicate information to handlers a few years ago.

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#133

Post by throw2016 »

King-Aaron wrote: post #3
nyolfen wrote: post #2

"This didn't make it into the piece, but here's how the Chinese treated people working with the CIA: According to one source, one asset working at a state tech institutes, and his pregnant wife, were executed live on closed circuit TV in front of the staff." https://twitter.com/zachsdorfman/status/1029861843521523712

Obviously a revelation on Twitter about a secretive organisation's workings should always be taken with a grain of salt. However these sorts of reports aren't too uncommon, and it surprises me how there's a lot of pro-china commentators in communities such as HN who seem to glaze over these sorts of things and still aggressively promote the "Chinese way of doing things" is superior to whatever western value or opinio…

Most of the comments are not pro China but highlight the brazen hypocrisy of getting worked out about China in the face of all encompassing surveillance currently run by the NSA, GCHQ and Google, Facebook and others which is a far bigger and ongoing threat to democracy and citizens here. China's actions are limited to China.

There is hardly any activism against the invasive surveillance of SV companies or protests against the NSA. This forum itself has its fair share of apologists for surveillance capitalism. So where are the protests in front of Google and Facebooks campuses and in Washington?

So if people don't care about these issues at home how can they care about them in China? This is simply not credible or serious.

China's actions don't impact people here, your governments and companies here do. In the absence of any mainstream activism, just singling out China for outrage and anger is duplicitous and comes across as motivated more by politics than any genuine concern for the issues or people impacted.

And using human rights for cheap points ultimately trivializes it and risks bad actors who have no interest in human rights pushing their own agenda. So better for the Chinese to fix their country, there are 1.3 billion of them, and for us to fix ours.

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#134

Post by nyolfen »

SEJeff wrote: post #113
solatic wrote: post #11

>But the CIA’s interim system contained a technical error: It connected back architecturally to the CIA’s main covert communications platform. When the compromise was suspected, the FBI and NSA both ran “penetration tests” to determine the security of the interim system. They found that cyber experts with access to the interim system could also access the broader covert communications system the agency was using to i…

Here I was always assuming they employed the types of people who read HN to build systems like this. I'd expect e2e crypto, perfect forward secrecy, perhaps something akin to tor, and maybe even the ability to use steganography to disguise the fact any comms were really happening at all. Oh look at this cute kitten picture, let me save it and then get the encrypted code out of it. That's great, let me upload this equ…

it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a tor service via bridge. the snowden docs showed that gchq uses tor to communicate with assets. a big part of the value of tor is that even if youre detected connecting to it, that doesnt prove youre doing anything in particular on it, only that you’re using the network.

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#135

Post by TangoTrotFox »

the_duke wrote: post #85
TangoTrotFox wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how do you think traitors providing potentially critical intelligence to one of the most dangerous agencies of a powerful and aggressive unfriendly foreign power should be treated, when there is literally zero doubt as to their guilt? And to be clear, I'm not condoning this action but I'm also not so quick condemn it. I'm genuinely uncertain if I somehow were the Chinese government what my decision…

So you are not condemning: - death penalty - death penalty for relatives of criminals - death penalty for pregnant relatives I'd love to know what country you live in and if you would condone laws that allow this.

Spies are people that turn against their own country, often for little more than a payoff, and participate in activities that can and have resulted in the death, torture, and worse of countless individuals. For instance Augusto Pinochet, as just one example among many, was the direct and orchestrated product of a CIA "regime change" -- an activity that at it's most fundamental level relies on traitors. Spying is taking a position of trust and using it to intentionally hurt, potentially severely, immense numbers of people - for what is often a token payoff.

We can even see that in this exact case. Earlier this year, there were reports that this issue was not caused by a technological issue but by various spies. One, former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee [1], allegedly gave away the names of these CIA spies to the Chinese for $25,000. It's ironic that the CIA spies faced death, and probably worse, because of other spies - but that is the very essence of what spies do. Cause death and suffering, generally for small amounts of money. It's despicable.

[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-cia-officer-jerry-ch...

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#136

Post by xkcd-sucks »

solatic wrote: post #11

>But the CIA’s interim system contained a technical error: It connected back architecturally to the CIA’s main covert communications platform. When the compromise was suspected, the FBI and NSA both ran “penetration tests” to determine the security of the interim system. They found that cyber experts with access to the interim system could also access the broader covert communications system the agency was using to i…

The experts in opsec forgot to apply their common sense rules (compartmentalization) to their own software

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#137

Post by GVIrish »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #98
Gustomaximus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is due to the ever increasing scale of the US intelligence services. From my working life perspective smaller teams of talented people are often more impactful than significantly larger teams. E.g. Large teams create bureaucracy. And 'weak links' become harder to spot and typically allowed to remain. I know nothing about this area so take my comment as curiosity only, but I wonder what USA gets/achie…

I don't think that's it. I personally think the best window into this world is William Binney and his thinthread project. He developed thinthread to protect Americans privacy, and it only was going to cost a handful of millions. His functioning program was scrapped for a billion dollar program that didn't protect Americans privacy and that didn't work because all it did was make the haystack so big finding the needle…

Often it's not so much that the billion dollar program was created to make defense contractors rich. It's that the attitude of the US military and intelligence agencies is that if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. The defense and intelligence contracting industries simply aid, abet, and exploit that propensity to enrich themselves.

So where a simple and cost effective solution would work, the US Military/Spy Agencies would want a platinum-plated solution that would give them total dominance in the situation at hand, which would spiral the costs and complexity to the point that the solution doesn't work at all. Contractors are never going to be a brake in that situation because it makes them filthy rich. And any employees who object get swept aside because the powers that be want to pursue the most aggressive and ambitious solution possible.

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#138

Post by GVIrish »

mikec3010 wrote: post #103
qaq wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that relevant ?

Shows a contradiction/hypocrisy. They have the money, but just choose to spend it on corporations and not humans.

That's a situation created by Congress, not federal agencies. Federal agencies with dire needs for high demand/high pay skills would love nothing more than to be able to hire full-time employees at market rates but it is very difficult for them to do so because of the federal pay scale and hiring guidelines.

It's part of the whole charade of smaller government. The number of actual government employees is reduced but then the government pays contracting companies 2x or 3x (or more) for contractors and ends up with same number of butts in seats.

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#139

Post by rb808 »

solatic wrote: post #11

>But the CIA’s interim system contained a technical error: It connected back architecturally to the CIA’s main covert communications platform. When the compromise was suspected, the FBI and NSA both ran “penetration tests” to determine the security of the interim system. They found that cyber experts with access to the interim system could also access the broader covert communications system the agency was using to i…

What are the salaries the CIA is paying? I doubt they have "the best" on it.

Re: Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

#140

Post by kharms »

secfirstmd wrote: post #130
evntllyCnsistnt wrote: post #74

Knowing how absurdly insecure any civilian consumer system is (laptop, smart phone, home assistant, self driving car), with zero day fire-and-not-a-drill-at-all advisories, pretty much every month, I don’t get how this sort of thing happens. I also fail to see how a decision like this could be made: The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations... To China? The degree of technical differences betwee…

What direct cryptographic attack do you know that works on a one time pad? (Aslong as the randomness used to build it is real, it is implemented properly and not re-used etc)

You don't need to break the code, just notice a pattern of use/behavior.
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