Chinese hackers stole trillions in intellectual property from multinational companies

Includes military technology, pharmaceutical data  

John Hayward 5 May 2022

 Boston-based security firm Cybereason released a report Wednesday which chronicled a “massive Chinese intellectual property theft operation” dubbed “Operation CuckooBees.”  The operation involved Chinese hackers stealing hundreds of gigabytes of high-tech intellectual property from some 30 multinational corporations, including military technology and pharmaceutical data. 

Cybereason said its Nocturnus Incident Response Team discovered the hacker campaign when it was hired to “investigate multiple intrusions targeting technology and manufacturing companies in North America, Europe, and Asia” in 2021...............To Read More

Hacking the Hacks

By Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments Sunday, February 02, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

What’s a four-letter word meaning digital intrusion and clueless liar with a press pass?

Nothing brings out the hacks like hacking takes. In the brave new digital age, hacking is everywhere and nowhere. The two kinds of hacks interface with stolen messages being passed along by hackers to hacks for their informational operations. The hacks usually claim not to know what the hackers were doing.

Sometimes the hacking was invented by the hacks.

The great collision of hack and hacker right now is all about the claim that Jeff Bezos, CEO of
Amazon, richest man alive, and, most importantly, owner of the Washington Post, had his sleazy affair exposed (resulting in the most expensive divorce settlement in human history) because he cares about human rights. The latest tawdry effort to ennoble the pictures of the WaPo owner’s private parts as a tool of foreign policy has enlisted the UN to accuse the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia of hacking his iPhoneX.

The collision of hack and hackery begins with a report by a UN Special Rapporteur (apparently you have to be a billionaire to get the UN to help you cover up your adulterous affair with a sleazy LA anchorwoman) which describes an "in-depth forensic level examination" of the phone and admits that it found no malware, no malicious software, and no evidence of jail-breaking tools.

Federal prosecutors soon let it slip that, as everyone had already known, the pictures came from the CEO’s mistress who passed them on to her brother, who then probably passed them to the tabloids.

But the UN and the media weren’t having any of it, and insisted that the Saudi crown prince personally hacked Jeff’s phone using Zionist software. Or, as the UN report puts it, "it is later established with reasonable certainty that the video's downloader infects Mr. Bezos' phone with malicious code." Earlier, the report had admitted that, "the contents of the downloader cannot be practically determined."

How can you establish with any kind of certainty the contents of software you didn’t examine?

In its truly pathetic conclusion, the report insists that, “Facebook confirms that ‘sending a specifically crafted MP4 [video] file to a WhatsApp user’ is a method for installing malicious spyware, exactly as was sent to Mr. Bezos." Except that the report had already admitted that it found no malicious code in the promotional video file that had been sent by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to Lauren Sanchez’s lover.

The UN report finds with “reasonable certainty” that a video downloader that experts couldn’t examine sent a specially crafted MP4 file just like the one they examined and found nothing special about.

The UN report blames "mobile spyware" from "NSO Group's Pegasus". The NSO Group is an Israeli-American security firm that helps friendly governments spy on terrorists and enemies. But Pegasus got into WhatsApp accounts with a “zero click” exploit. Nothing as clumsy as a tainted video file.

To buy the hacking story that the hacks are selling, you have to believe in a Saudi-Zionist conspiracy to steal pictures of Jeff’s private parts by using tactics as crude as any teenage Pakistani script kiddie. And yet, despite these crude efforts, the best experts Bezos could command have found no trace of them.

Occam’s Razor weeps.

If only Carlos Danger, who also claimed that he had been hacked, owned a major paper and the UN.

Meanwhile over in Brazil, the hackery of the hacks collided with actual hacking. And media hacks are outraged that one of their own, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who once defended Hamas and Hezbollah, was accused of guiding and inciting a hack of private messages between public officials, including a heroic judge turned Minister of Justice, who were investigating leftist corruption.

Operation Car Wash in Brazil had uncovered truly monumental corruption that brought down the hierarchy of the Workers’ Party (PT) which had been robbing the country blind through Petrobras.

Petrobras, the megacorp whose largest owner is the Brazilian government, had been turned into the private piggy bank of the friends of the working class with money flowing between corporations, oligarchs, and officials, which went into their pockets and funded the political campaigns of the Left.

Rather than exposing corruption, The Intercept’s top leftist hack had allegedly colluded with hackers to hack into the messages of the investigative judge who had helped bring down the leftist mafia. But the same international media which ignored the massive scale of the Petrobas corruption, has rushed out identical editorials clamoring that Greenwald is being persecuted for exposing Brazil’s corruption.

That’s like claiming that Jimmy Hoffa was killed and buried in cement to promote ethics in construction.

Greenwald isn’t just a radical hack funded by Pierre Omidyar, a mini-Soros Franco-Persian billionaire, his boyfriend, David Miranda, is a congressman from the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). PSOL has formed coalitions with Communist and Marxist parties and is an occasional ally and rival of the larger Workers’ Party (PT) which also has Communist partners. Good thing the media won’t report that.

Set aside the question of the degree of Greenwald’s collusion with the hackers, one of whom had been previously accused of raping a teenage girl, and this is at best a case of interfering with an investigation. Greenwald was undermining the credibility of the investigation that had exposed the leftist mafia running Brazil while improving the political fortunes of his political allies on the Left. Including his lover.

That’s not exposing corruption. That is corruption.

Just to prove the point, Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “The Bolsonaro government is pursuing state retaliation against Glenn Greenwald because of his work as a journalist to expose public abuse and corruption. Brazil should drop the charges immediately and stop its attacks on a free and open press.”

Greenwald was actually retaliating against a public official who was exposing abuse and corruption. The hacked messages he got his little hands on, at worst, accuse investigators of bias. That’s nothing compared to the massive amounts of bribes and corruption surrounding Operation Car Wash.

Nor does a leftist hack, working with hackers, who is funded by a foreign billionaire embody a free press.

The Intercept is a radical billionaire’s private influence operation. What financial interests might benefit from bringing down a conservative government and putting the Petrobas mafia back in power?

That’s a question that the media will carefully avoid approaching with a million-foot pole.

But what can the hacks tell us about the ethics of hacking? From the cases of Bezos and Greenwald, we can conclude that the media thinks that hacking conservatives is ethical, but not the owner of the Washington Post. The media hasn’t stopped fuming over the publication of the DNC emails, but was happy enough when Elliot Broidy, a Republican fundraiser and Trump ally, was hacked by Qatar.

Just as Bezos’ Washington Post colluded with Qatar, so did the media outlets who had Broidy’s emails carefully fed and spun to them by Qatari interests and lobbyists. That’s how the hacks of the press do it.

The media had no objections when Sarah Palin’s email was hacked. Hacks frantically scurried through searching for anything they could use. But when Colin Powell’s hacked emails revealed an affair, the media slowly backed away. Powell, by then, was an Obama ally and no longer a Republican. The hack that exposed the emails of Sidney Blumenthal was ignored despite the troubling light that the emails cast on the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton. Certainly no one in the media called it exposing corruption.

What’s the difference between Broidy and Blumenthal’s emails? Politics. Hacking a Trump ally or a Bolsonaro ally is journalism. Hacking a Hillary ally is an act of war. Against whom? Against the Left.

This is the age of informational warfare where media hacks and state hackers collude to create narratives. Espionage and fake news have come together as opposition research. Political parties hire foreign agents, state hackers pretend to be human rights activists, and the digital fog of war blinds all.

Out of this paranoid hall of mirrors where everything is backward, come bizarre stories that are clearly false and which exist only as informational warfare, narratives that have no relationship to reality, confirmed by experts who ignore the facts, because the old walls between truth and lies are gone. Journalism is dead. In its place is something else. A shadowy network of firms like Fusion GPS. A dark world of opposition research and narratives run by campaign operatives, security firms, intelligence agencies, and media operatives funded by billionaires who pretend to be everything they’re not.

And in that darkness, the hack and hacker have become one.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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Thank you for reading.

To Hack or Not To Hack

By Peter Zeihan @ Zeihan on Geopolitics Visit the archives to re-read and share

The New York Times dropped a fun piece last week asserting a coalition of like-minded national security and intelligence professionals are neck-deep in an offensive cyber operation against the Russian electricity system. The article suggests the hacking was meant to provide a cudgel to beat Russia with should it intervene in American elections again. The real kicker was the assertion made by a host of anonymous sources that not only was U.S. President Donald Trump unaware of the operation, but that the sources were afraid to tell him for fear the White House would shut the operation down.

There’s a bit of peeling required for this particular onion:

Computerization didn’t happen all at once. At first computers were multi-billion-dollar monuments of circuitry that only major governments could afford, to be used “simply” to compute complicated math (ergo the term computer). They certainly weren’t hooked into civilian infrastructure. Besides, there was nothing to “hook” into. Pre-1980s tech was analogue and manual, not digital and automatic.

Fast forward to the 1980s and this changed rapidly. The marriage of now-more-attainable computers to telephony brought us modems long before it brought us smartphones. That linkage enabled the first computer networks to snake through the worlds of finance, media, energy, academia and manufacturing. As computers became ubiquitous, the possibility of extreme damage being inflicted upon the average American citizen expanded exponentially.

A new policy was required for this new era.

The president at the time was Ronald Reagan. His executive guidance was threefold:

First, the U.S. government would provide no cyber protection to any part of the civilian system. Individual firms and citizens were wholly responsible for protecting their computer systems from outside threats.

Second, the U.S. government would maintain an absolutely massive hacker corps with standing orders to hack everything and put malware and backdoors into every imaginable foreign system.

Third, the U.S. would deign to identify precisely where its red lines were.

These three points explain why it is so simple for Nigerians to defraud your grandmother, why the Russians could interfere in the U.S. elections with ease, and why everyone is so afraid to go after the really important stuff: infrastructure in the United States. In essence, America’s cyber policy is a lot like the rest of its armed forces: you can poke and prod the exposed flanks of the behemoth and you might or might not get swiped at for your trouble, but if you ever do something that really draws its attention, well… you’d better have a great bunker. In the event the U.S. ever did decide to cut loose, it would have a remarkably shitty quarter.

The lack of cyberdefense would ensure that power grids would fail, vulnerable city bureaucracies would be left helpless, and all the businesses that forgot to update their Windows operating system from last decade’s would find they no longer have computers. In other words, it would hurt. But whoever the U.S. was going to war with would find themselves facing off against nearly four decades of surveillance, planning, and preparation by skilled, vengeful nerds. In the best-case scenario (for the targets), they would regress a century as everything from power to water to communications to shipping simply seized up, never coming on-line again until a complete computer-free overhaul was completed.

The Reagan administration’s guidance on cyber sat broadly unchanged for the next four presidents. Offensive cyber was used rarely and the U.S. refuses to discuss it. It is only under Donald Trump that some shifts have occurred. In Trump’s early months as executive the U.S. government leaked it had done something I find hilarious:

It didn’t simply identify the specific Russian agents who had interfered in the United States’ 2016 presidential elections, it sent cease-and-desist letters to those agents at their home addresses complete with enough personal touches to drive home to the Russian hackers that the U.S. government knew more about their personal lives than the Russian government itself.

What all this makes clear is that the U.S. realized it had undersold itself and underutilized its tools, which is quite literally the last thing you want to do with a deterrent. But times are changing and so, it appears, the pace of operations is picking up.

These operations involve extremely detailed pre-operational surveillance and planning so that when the time comes, the real break-in can happen easily. It creates options. The operation can go farther and, as the Times claims happened here, an implant ready to hurt critical infrastructure can be left at the ready. It’s a line that until recently the Americans claimed they did not cross except in exceptional cases.

The problem, of course, is that none of this, right up until the attack occurs, is public. Which makes deterrence more than a little bit of a problem. So let’s look at that Times article again:

Is the U.S. hacking the Russian power grid? Certainly. The U.S. has been hacking the Russian power grid since before Gorbachev.

Is there a conspiracy within the U.S. government against Donald Trump? Certainly not. Anyone hacking the Russian power system is simply doing their job as demanded by Reagan and HW Bush and Clinton and W Bush and Obama… and Trump. It's about planning and, if the Times is right, prepositioning assets. Not executing a broad-scale attack.

Is Trump aware that the Russian power grid is being hacked by American agents? Of course. Everything that matters in Russia is being hacked by American agents. Ditto for China. And Iran. And a follow-on list of countries so long I’m not going to go into because of the hate mail it would generate.

Does the national security establishment dislike Trump? Well duh. Trump is upending seven decades of tradition. That’s awkward even on a good day.

As to the issue with the Times article, however, I’m going to call bullshit. If an anonymous source is concerned the president will shut down his favorite top-secret anti-Russian program, blabbing about his favorite top-secret program to the Times -- which makes its bones publishing everything in a public forum -- would indicate that said agent isn’t all that bright.

In fact, the only people this article seems to be alerting are the Russians. But as the author pointed out, the government raised no national security concerns about the article. That suggests this is all about sending the Russians a message.

The context of that message is one I can only guess at, but I must underline repeatedly that the United States is not on the verge of shutting off the lights in Russia. There is an enormous difference between hacking something like the Russian power system to install malware and activating said malware. The former is rude… and a normal part of state policy. The latter would crash air traffic control and shut down mass transit and darken hospitals. It would kill a lot of people and be a flat-out act of war.

It also isn’t going to happen without a change in strategic relations far more radical than anything Donald Trump has brought to the table to date.

But the Americans now have drawn a line in the sand, publicly. The question is who is going to cross it.

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Far-Left Magazine says the DNC wasn’t Hacked, Emails were Leaked

By Onan Coca August 10, 2017

For the last year or so many of us on the right have wondered about the possibility that the DNC (and Hillary campaign team) emails weren’t actually “hacked” but that they were leaked from the inside.
Conspiracy theorists have listed various possible leakers, including former DNC staffer Seth Rich or Debbie Wasserman Schutlz’ IT guy, the now infamous Imran Awan.  However, these theories are always laughed at as “conspiratorial” and then we are told that “of course” the Russians “hacked” the emails, because the “intelligence” community told us so.

Has the intelligence community ever provided a single shred of evidence that the DNC was hacked? NO.........Do yourself a favor and read the entire report at The Nation...........To Read More.....