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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

#141

Post by hackermailman »

sandworm101 wrote: post #115
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…

Between the lines: it was Tor. Deploys on computers. Web-based. Detectable through decryption or pattern analysis. Firewalls. It was a pair of Tor hidden services. The mistake was probably that they ran both on the same machine with only a firewall separating them, rather than physically different servers.

Which sounds like a management decision to cut costs by running them on the same server. This is probably why we are seeing ex regime department heads in the news lately as political pundits in hopes they create enough deflection to avoid prosecution for 30+ agents dying on their watch.

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

#142

Post by debt »

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 CIA is incompetent. It’s their system.

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

#143

Post by yardie »

st26 wrote: post #122
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…

To me, preventing this seems like exactly the sort of thing the NSA ought to be for.

There was a time when the NSA was in the white hat business; securing networks, identifying vulnerabilities and contributing to net sec projects. SELinux has been their most famous contribution. This all changed with the war on terrorism. Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities was the mission.

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

#144

Post by 394549 »

It's probably also a mistake to use the set of communication systems for all your agents, even if you trust them. For something as high-risk as this, they should use bespoke systems for each agent or each sub-network. Doing otherwise is putting all their eggs in one basket.

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

#145

Post by anotheramala »

cascom wrote: post #104
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…

From my brief view into a federal agency: Employee breakdown is as follows: 1/6 extremely capable and dedicated high performers 1/6 extremely capable and dedicated but go home at 5pm 1/3 average (not going to screw things up massively, but also never going to make a large contribution) 1/3 shocking (as in where do you even find people this useless and disagreeable - if you’re lucky their managers put them in an offic…

Because federal employees cannot practically be fired it is very common to try to move them sideways to get rid of them. Eventually they just get promoted.

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

#146

Post by 394549 »

yardie wrote: post #143
st26 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, preventing this seems like exactly the sort of thing the NSA ought to be for.

There was a time when the NSA was in the white hat business; securing networks, identifying vulnerabilities and contributing to net sec projects. SELinux has been their most famous contribution. This all changed with the war on terrorism. Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities was the mission.

> There was a time when the NSA was in the white hat business; securing networks, identifying vulnerabilities and contributing to net sec projects. SELinux has been their most famous contribution. This all changed with the war on terrorism. Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities was the mission.

No, they've always had both roles. For instance, their experience and knowledge of advanced code-breaking techniques allowed them to strengthen the DES cipher's S-boxes in ways that weren't publicly understood until decades later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA%2...

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

#147

Post by anotheramala »

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…

The Chinese have an active propaganda machine for decades which tells all Chinese people the world is out to get them. They have completely internalized that. This makes them defensive and nationalistic so they can defend whatever the state does to them.

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

#148

Post by jonnybgood »

yardie wrote: post #143
st26 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, preventing this seems like exactly the sort of thing the NSA ought to be for.

There was a time when the NSA was in the white hat business; securing networks, identifying vulnerabilities and contributing to net sec projects. SELinux has been their most famous contribution. This all changed with the war on terrorism. Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities was the mission.

It hasn’t changed. Why you’re referring to falls under Information Assurance in their mission statement.

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

#149

Post by mikeyouse »

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…

Binney is a complete crank.. I'd be very cautious of any first person narratives that he tells, especially when he paints himself as the hero.

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

#150

Post by SEJeff »

nyolfen wrote: post #134
SEJeff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tor was funded by the DoD / CIA for exactly this: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-pr...
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