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China Government

Did China Hack The CIA In A Massive Intelligence Breach From 2010 To 2012? (ibtimes.com) 115

schwit1 quotes the International Business Times: Both the CIA and the FBI declined to comment on reports saying the Chinese government killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources from 2010 to 2012 and dismantled the agency's spying operations in the country. It is described as one of the worst intelligence breaches in decades, current and former American officials told the New York Times.

Investigators were uncertain whether the breach was a result of a double agent within the CIA who had betrayed the U.S. or whether the Chinese had hacked the communications system used by the agency to be in contact with foreign sources. The Times reported Saturday citing former American officials from the final weeks of 2010 till the end of 2012, the Chinese killed up to 20 CIA sources.

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Did China Hack The CIA In A Massive Intelligence Breach From 2010 To 2012?

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Betteridge's law of headlines says "No."

  • by Anonymous Coward

    For no particular reason we cannot have headlines written like that for at least the next 4 years...

    Proper Headlines:
    Massive Chinese Data Breach Cripples CIA
    Administration in Chaos Over Chinese Hack
    Did Russia Pass Hacked Information to China
    Crippling CIA Hack Leaked, Did Trump Know?
    Trump Failed to Act On Chinese Hacking Allegations

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday May 21, 2017 @07:37PM (#54460869)

      For no particular reason we cannot have headlines written like that for at least the next 4 years...

      Proper Headlines:
      Massive Chinese Data Breach Cripples CIA
      Administration in Chaos Over Chinese Hack
      Did Russia Pass Hacked Information to China
      Crippling CIA Hack Leaked, Did Trump Know?
      Trump Failed to Act On Chinese Hacking Allegations

      None of those are "proper" headlines, because there is no actual evidence that they are true. TFA does not contain a single named or quoted source. It consists entirely of rumors, conjecture, and innuendo.

      The reason that Betteridge's Law of Headlines is generally accurate is that using a question as a headline is a great crutch for weak journalism.

      • Maybe it's a mark of the CIA's extreme deviousness that they would create a plot in which their secrets were stolen and their agents betrayed just to frame the Chinese state but I doubt it. In any case, why isn't the reference to the original NYT story [nytimes.com]?

      • Beside that, some of the headlines are really unlikely even if we discover at the end China actually had hacked information. In particular, why in the hell would the Russian would like to pass hacked information to China instead of exploiting it themselves? You must assume they are really, really stupid to waste the information by passing it to China, even for economic considerations or whatever favor China can give them in return.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    President Trump did say in an interview 2 months ago that the CIA had been hacked.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    A) It's all a Russian plot. Ergo, Trump must be impeached.
    B) Hillary's emails, which were all part of a Russian conspiracy, so Trump must be impeached
    C) Obama spilled the beans, but it wasn't his fault. The Russians hacked his golf retreats, so Trump must be impeached.
    D) Tim Cook of Apple was hacked, so... ditto
    E) Trump did it.

  • by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Sunday May 21, 2017 @07:18PM (#54460805)

    China and Russia are strategic competitors. We should strive to have good relations with both, enhance partnership at points of shared interest, but also realize they are competitors. And for cryin' out loud, we should not be outsourcing a vast amount of our manufacturing base and knowledge to a strategic competitor. Enhancing economic partnership, certainly. Giving up our manufacturing base to one or the other is madness.

    The pundits tell us we're a smart advanced country, manufacturing is beneath us. However, countries like China, Japan, and Germany, with national IQs equal to or greater than ours, cultivate manufacturing. So there's that.

    • by djcopi ( 1654947 )
      I agree: maintain good relations but don't hand over the keys to the kingdom. There's nothing "beneath us" with respect to manufacturing, that's just the Newspeak explanation of why all the jobs went away. Take a close look and you'll see that there aren't enough good paying white collar jobs around and a lot of good, regular people simply aren't cut out for them anyway. And if manufacturing jobs are "beneath us", apparently a lot of I.T. related jobs are, too, since they're also being outsourced. Outso
  • Probably (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 21, 2017 @07:23PM (#54460825)

    It takes a special combination of arrogance and stupidity to believe that the U.S. can infiltrate and spy on every other intelligence organization on the planet, but somehow nobody is able to do the same to us using the same security vulnerabilities we leave in software specifically so people can be spied upon.

    So yes, I do believe the CIA was breached.

    • Re:Probably (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday May 21, 2017 @07:48PM (#54460893)

      If this was a result of a "software vulnerability" then a lot of people at the CIA need to be fired and/or jailed. There is absolutely no reason that a list of double agents should be stored online or even on a computer at all. The "need to know" actual identifying information should be limited to the each asset's direct handler. Even the handler's boss doesn't need to know. Instead, the asset himself can be given secondary contact information and a code word to use if the main handler goes silent. Knowledge segmentation is standard spook tradecraft. How could they possibly screw up something so simple so badly?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )

        Knowledge segmentation is standard spook tradecraft. How could they possibly screw up something so simple so badly?

        They kind of fucked that up on day one. They learned the nasty lesson from UK spooks of using criminals to do various work, but they didn't learn to keep them at arms length and in the dark (good segmentation) but invited them into the fold to become full members of the org. The Church Commission stuff and many other things go on about such fuckups at a fundamental level and it's very likely

    • Re:Probably (Score:4, Interesting)

      by currently_awake ( 1248758 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @07:45AM (#54462385)
      China doesn't need to break American crypto, they just need to follow the data through their firewall to find the spies. They could also use a little bit of social engineering or a "dropped" USB stick if that wasn't possible. Secrecy doesn't exist against a country.
  • The NSA's role? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Sunday May 21, 2017 @07:24PM (#54460829) Journal

    Perhaps if the NSA concentrated on cyber security instead of cyber attacks, this might not have happened?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      To be fair, you have no idea what the NSA concentrates on, except for the info that has been selectively leaked.

    • by dargaud ( 518470 )

      Perhaps if the NSA concentrated on cyber security instead of cyber attacks, this might not have happened?

      And not leaving identified cyber-vulnerabilities in commonly used cyber-software... Do I use cyber too much ?

  • CIA = (Score:5, Funny)

    by Steve Jackson ( 4687763 ) on Sunday May 21, 2017 @07:33PM (#54460857)
    C_atastrophically I_gnorant A_ssholes...
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Do you really think Chinese nationals working in government IT are loyal to America first? What the hell did you expect when you started packing government IT with Chinese nationals on H1-B visas?

  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Sunday May 21, 2017 @08:32PM (#54461015) Journal
    The Soviet Union went for the mids and politics of US/UK gov/mil/contractors. Someone to talk to, some cash, some politics.
    Classic spy offers.
    The UK and later the US tried to counter that with better working conditions, better wages and more testing of trusted staff to see if they had been turned.
    From the 1920-1970's the UK leaked everything interesting to the Soviet Union.
    The US tried to counter such efforts by fully understanding the past and politics of every applicant. That worked until the USA did not walk the past of every applicant and hired on contractor trust or because a vital skill was needed. The FBI and other agencies would also test trusted US staff with undercover cash offers and see if they reported any security contacts outside work.
    The US needed translators, experts for Korea, Vietnam, France, China, the Soviet Union, its Middle East occupations. Generations of very interesting people got clearances based on skill not security. They did their job well and reported back US methods and got to understand how the US looked for staff and then how to move up the ranks of the US clandestine services.
    The US could have stopped all that by not using contractors but that was not an option politically. Any new security that blocked a contractor was removed by US party political efforts to allow contractors back into the most secret parts of the US gov and mil.
    It took China a long time to understand how the CIA, NSA and GCHQ spy in China.
    Dont have radio, data networks or any chatter from base to base to a command structure, everything is been collected on by the NSA and GCHQ.
    MI6 and the CIA used a different approach. Invite a lot of students from China to top US and UK universities and try and get the students to enjoy freedom and democracy. When they returned to the Communist gov in China they would recall the fun freedoms and might just consider working for the CIA, MI6 later in China.
    What the CIA and MI6 did not consider is that China would flood the West with trusted Communists that would enter the US and UK educations systems, learn and take everything back to China.
    China started to notice the efforts to turn its graduates in the UK and US. China allowed some of its graduates to be turned and waited, watched and slowly understood what the West needed and wanted from spies in China over the years.
    It took a few decades but China finally saw the pattern of the US and UK spy efforts in China, different to NSA and GCHQ collect it all.
    China now understands when and how the approach will take place and has flooded the West with people who seem to want to spy for the CIA and MI6.
    What the West saw as very smart people finally wanting freedom, wanting to change politics in China was just China flooding the West with its own spies.
    The other issue for the GCHQ and NSA is the quality and amount of data collected in China and translation needed. Local staff at US and UK collection sites, later working on material all needed China experts. The secure hiring of expert staff over generations was always an issue given the skills needed and the time needed for results, Korea, Vietnam, handover of Hong Kong and later decades.
    The US and UK so needed staff and spies in China that they never had the time to fully consider the idea that hiring a lot of people without the best security practices was not a good idea.
    Decades later the results are the same that the UK faced with spies from the Soviet Union in the 1920-1980's.

    Is the CIA leaking from computer databases? If any nation had that easy access deep within the CIA they would not act. They would watch and alter the flow of information and use it as a disinformation strategy to flush out more spies. Why act now and get the CIA to consider its issues and then be totally locked out?
    The data flow back from spies in China could be a weak point. Using the "internet" or contact with a foreigner in China.
    China understands every network in and out and the server
    • >Why act now and get the CIA to consider its issues and then be totally locked out?

      Get bonuses, promotions, retirement premias, more stuff to bump up the resume

      And moreover, Chicoms never had any issue flooding the West with disinformation, just like USSR did

    • What the CIA and MI6 did not consider is that China would flood the West with trusted Communists that would enter the US and UK educations systems, learn and take everything back to China.

      Hmm, that reads like a 60es spy thriller. Are you saying that "the immensely powerful inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party, known only to a few, highly classified individuals" etc, somehow have brainwashed the enormous numbers of Chinese students going abroad, to be fanatically devoted to extreme Maoism and interested only in subverting the legitimate government of rich people over American consumers? Without anybody ever noticing? Wow. But with that amount of power, why haven't they simply wiped the

  • Because surely the Window$ they use are that much better than anyone else's. If you need a scape goat, blame Bill for creating a shitty OS and using contracts and backscratching to keep people locked in. Linux is far more human friendly than it used to be, but heaven forbid if Micro$oft would let anyone find out. Since we still use COBOL, assembly, and 5 1/4 floppies for our defense, using Micro$oft tech wouldn't surprise me. IT gotta make a living too and you know any country that charges $100 for a gov is
  • by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara@jane@hudson.icloud@com> on Sunday May 21, 2017 @09:02PM (#54461097) Journal

    The story talks about the execution of more than a dozen spies, but doesn't mention that this is perfectly acceptable under the Geneva Conventions. Leaving people to perhaps be a little outraged that "how dare they execute someone." The US has a history of doing the same thing (and so does pretty much everyone else on the q.t.) - I just find it interesting that neither the story, nor the comments, reflect on the consequences of this. Someone blackmails you into spying for them, you could end up dead. Why not just say "screw it" instead? You might even get your would-be blackmailer swinging at the end or a noose instead, or with, you.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I know the Rosenbergs (I think that was their name) were executed. Are there examples of the US executing spys in the US since then?
      I'm not thinking of any, and remember a number of them being caught and in the news. One place I worked at had posters of spys caught by the government as reminders not to mishandle classified info, but those all just got jail time.

      I'm just curious if I hadn't heard of any or just forgot.

      • There were plenty who were shot in the field in WW2 by both sides. It's perfectly legal.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Just in case you are too young to remember.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

  • by wildstoo ( 835450 ) on Monday May 22, 2017 @06:52AM (#54462217)

    Investigators were uncertain whether the breach was a result of a double agent within the CIA who had betrayed the U.S. or whether the Chinese had hacked the communications system used by the agency to be in contact with foreign sources.

    Yahoo Messenger with a ROT-13 plugin?

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The CIA has a few ways into and out of China.
      The "internet".
      A person who is spying for the US in China gets to go on holiday and meet their CIA handlers.
      Someone in China the CIA trusts collects messages. Embassy, long term educational, faith, private company or brand.

      The problems are the internet is well understood by China in and out of China. Every VPN or other connection is tracked to its origin and destination by China.
      Use encryption and that is noted. Try and hide encryption and China gets re
  • Unlike all you on the civvy side, we've been in Cold War II for quite a while.

    And now we are on to Cold War III.

    Hope you feel happy about outing all the NATO operatives for your masters in China and Russia.

    Must make you feel proud.

  • China is starting to look like an enemy, but the NSA is being limited in their abilities to be able to thwart them.

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