Black Duck Eggs and Other Secrets of Chinese Hacks

Roberto123 writes "Network World offers some insights into the way China infiltrates US organizations, physically and via computer, to steal information. Security expert Ira Winkler says there are far more serious threats out there than the 'laughable' uproar over China's hack of Google."

Re:Hmmm ...

[interkin3tic]

That seems to be all the evidence needed.

From TFA:

"I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.

Sounds like this security consultant is pretty quick to assume that we need more security. I wonder why.

And it's not just that one restaurant. Check out this menu [wordpress.com], something definitely smells fishy about it to me. No doubt it's a north korean spy base.

Re:I gotta agree.

[stephanruby]

Not if you know you will be able to manipulate the recruits. China has a lot of control over the lives of those peoples relatives back home.

This assumes that all the Chinese expats even *like* their family back home. I can tell you from personal observation that the more a person stays in the US, the less and less they like their family from back home.

Re:the lede

[Gonoff]

They have done similar to the UK. It was the aerospace industry.

Some readings of UK history post WW2 could be seen to show economic sabotage that only changed when we said that we could not afford to help with Korea.

No, there's a lot of this and it's real

[Anonymous Coward]

I look at all this smug poo-pooing of the possibility of Chinese espionage and have to shake my head. Please don't be so smug. I'm a longterm contractor in Silicon Valley and I know about a number of genuine espionage situations. There was a Chinese-backed semiconductor company here a decade ago, you'd know the name. They made chips in volume for PCs and laptops. As a contractor I discovered they had in the heart of their popular products a DSP engine designed by TI which they'd pirated. They'd had help taking it from TI and it was clear there was at least one plant within TI by the Chinese. Their government shared useful information and ran a lot of recruited engineers inside companies here. I remember various newspaper stories over the years about engineers caught redhanded taking designs out of the country.

The same company had financial help building and running a motel nearby in Fremont where some of their customers stayed, but it also many other business people meeting with various companies. The motel was bugged, I was told by a close Chinese-American friend in the semi company. The semi firm got the customer private conversations and I think phone conversations.

In another case, an Israeli telecom chip company was designing software that is used in many datacom systems through which a LOT of US packets flow. I heard that there were backdoors in the hardware/software systems they sold to major communications operators. Some of us non-Israelis knew that Mossad ran some of the people in the company, but what could we do about it? The company got financial backing from Israeli intelligence but it would have been hard to prove since it was run through the Cayman Islands.

A lot of designs and technology have been pirated by Chinese, Taiwanese, and other governments. It's somewhat common knowledge here. And there are some very worrisome backdoors, for example the known sly replications of chips used in routers but with additional logic for remote access. The US military is well aware of this and there have been published stories about it. Just because the black egg story has credibility issues doesn't mean others aren't more solid.