On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a
12-story white office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.
The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors
and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A
growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American
intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the
army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming
percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and
government agencies originate in and around the white tower.
An unusually detailed 60-page study,
to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm,
tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated
of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the
United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of
the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the
hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other
plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one
comparatively small area.
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the
founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or
the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks
in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks
from this one neighborhood.”
Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also
believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence Estimate,
issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States
intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking
groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for
commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its
classified content.
Mandiant provided an advance copy of its report to The New York Times,
saying it hoped to “bring visibility to the issues addressed in the
report.” Times reporters then tested the conclusions with other experts,
both inside and outside government, who have examined links between the
hacking groups and the army (Mandiant was hired by The New York Times
Company to investigate a sophisticated Chinese-origin attack on its news
operations, but concluded it was not the work of Comment Crew, but
another Chinese group. The firm is not currently working for the Times
Company but it is in discussions about a business relationship.)
While Comment Crew has drained terabytes of data from companies like
Coca-Cola, increasingly its focus is on companies involved in the
critical infrastructure of the United States — its electrical power
grid, gas lines and waterworks. According to the security researchers,
one target was a company with remote access to more than 60 percent of
oil and gas pipelines in North America. The unit was also among those
that attacked the computer security firm RSA, whose computer codes
protect confidential corporate and government databases.
Contacted Monday, officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington again
insisted that their government does not engage in computer hacking, and
that such activity is illegal. They describe China itself as a victim of
computer hacking, and point out, accurately, that there are many
hacking groups inside the United States. But in recent years the Chinese
attacks have grown significantly, security researchers say. Mandiant
has detected more than 140 Comment Crew intrusions since 2006. American
intelligence agencies and private security firms that track many of the
20 or so other Chinese groups every day say those groups appear to be
contractors with links to the unit.
And the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday that the allegations were ‘‘unprofessional.’’
‘‘Making unfounded accusations based on preliminary results is both
irresponsible and unprofessional, and is not helpful for the resolution
of the relevant problem,’’ said Hong Lei, a ministry spokesman. ‘‘China
resolutely opposes hacking actions and has established relevant laws
and regulations and taken strict law enforcement measures to defend
against online hacking activities.’’
While the unit’s existence and operations are considered a Chinese state
secret, Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the Republican chairman
of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that the
Mandiant report was “completely consistent with the type of activity the
Intelligence Committee has been seeing for some time.”
The White House said it was “aware” of the Mandiant report, and Tommy
Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said, “We have
repeatedly raised our concerns at the highest levels about cybertheft
with senior Chinese officials, including in the military, and we will
continue to do so.”
The United States government is planning to begin a more aggressive
defense against Chinese hacking groups, starting on Tuesday. Under a
directive signed by President Obama last week, the government plans to
share with American Internet providers information it has gathered about
the unique digital signatures of the largest of the groups, including
Comment Crew and others emanating from near where Unit 61398 is based.
But the government warnings will not explicitly link those groups, or
the giant computer servers they use, to the Chinese army. The question
of whether to publicly name the unit and accuse it of widespread theft
is the subject of ongoing debate.
“There are huge diplomatic sensitivities here,” said one intelligence official, with frustration in his voice.
But Obama administration officials say they are planning to tell China’s
new leaders in coming weeks that the volume and sophistication of the
attacks have become so intense that they threaten the fundamental
relationship between Washington and Beijing.
The United States government also has cyberwarriors. Working with Israel, the United States has used malicious software called Stuxnet
to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But government officials
insist they operate under strict, if classified, rules that bar using
offensive weapons for nonmilitary purposes or stealing corporate data.
The United States finds itself in something of an asymmetrical digital
war with China. “In the cold war, we were focused every day on the
nuclear command centers around Moscow,” one senior defense official said
recently. “Today, it’s fair to say that we worry as much about the
computer servers in Shanghai.”
A Shadowy Unit
Unit 61398 — formally, the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army’s
General Staff Department’s 3rd Department — exists almost nowhere in
official Chinese military descriptions. Yet intelligence analysts who
have studied the group say it is the central element of Chinese computer
espionage. The unit was described in 2011
as the “premier entity targeting the United States and Canada, most
likely focusing on political, economic, and military-related
intelligence” by the Project 2049 Institute, a nongovernmental
organization in Virginia that studies security and policy issues in
Asia.
While the Obama administration has never publicly discussed the Chinese unit’s activities, a secret State Department cable
written the day before Barack Obama was elected president in November
2008 described at length American concerns about the group’s attacks on
government sites. (At the time American intelligence agencies called the
unit “Byzantine Candor,” a code word dropped after the cable was
published by WikiLeaks.)
The Defense Department and the State Department were particular targets,
the cable said, describing how the group’s intruders send e-mails,
called “spearphishing” attacks, that placed malware on target computers
once the recipient clicked on them. From there, they were inside the
systems.
American officials say that a combination of diplomatic concerns and the
desire to follow the unit’s activities have kept the government from
going public. But Mandiant’s report is forcing the issue into public
view.
For more than six years, Mandiant tracked the actions of Comment Crew,
so named for the attackers’ penchant for embedding hidden code or
comments into Web pages. Based on the digital crumbs the group left
behind — its attackers have been known to use the same malware, Web
domains, Internet protocol addresses, hacking tools and techniques
across attacks — Mandiant followed 141 attacks by the group, which it
called “A.P.T. 1” for Advanced Persistent Threat 1.
“But those are only the ones we could easily identify,” said Mr. Mandia.
Other security experts estimate that the group is responsible for
thousands of attacks.
As Mandiant mapped the Internet protocol addresses and other bits of
digital evidence, it all led back to the edges of Pudong district of
Shanghai, right around the Unit 61398 headquarters. The group’s report,
along with 3,000 addresses and other indicators that can be used to
identify the source of attacks, concludes “the totality of the evidence”
leads to the conclusion that “A.P.T. 1 is Unit 61398.”
Mandiant discovered that two sets of I.P. addresses used in the attacks
were registered in the same neighborhood as Unit 61398’s building.
“It’s where more than 90 percent of the attacks we followed come from,” said Mr. Mandia.
The only other possibility, the report concludes with a touch of
sarcasm, is that “a secret, resourced organization full of mainland
Chinese speakers with direct access to Shanghai-based telecommunications
infrastructure is engaged in a multiyear enterprise-scale computer
espionage campaign right outside of Unit 61398’s gates.”
The most fascinating elements of the Mandiant report follow the
keystroke-by-keystroke actions of several of the hackers who the firm
believes work for the P.L.A. Mandiant tracked their activities from
inside the computer systems of American companies they were invading.
The companies had given Mandiant investigators full access to rid them
of the Chinese spies.
One of the most visible hackers it followed is UglyGorilla, who first
appeared on a Chinese military forum in January 2004, asking whether
China has a “similar force” to the “cyber army” being set up by the
American military.
By 2007 UglyGorilla was turning out a suite of malware with what the
report called a “clearly identifiable signature.” Another hacker, called
“DOTA” by Mandiant, created e-mail accounts that were used to plant
malware. That hacker was tracked frequently using a password that
appeared to be based on his military unit’s designation. DOTA and
UglyGorilla both used the same I.P. addresses linked back to Unit
61398’s neighborhood.
Mandiant discovered several cases in which attackers logged into their
Facebook and Twitter accounts to get around China’s firewall that blocks
ordinary citizen’s access, making it easier to track down their real
identities.
Mandiant also discovered an internal China Telecom memo discussing the
state-owned telecom company’s decision to install high-speed fiber-optic
lines for Unit 61398’s headquarters.
China’s defense ministry has denied that it is responsible for
initiating attacks. “It is unprofessional and groundless to accuse the
Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without any conclusive
evidence,” it said last month, one of the statements that prompted
Mandiant to make public its evidence.
Escalating Attacks
Mandiant believes Unit 61398 conducted sporadic attacks on American
corporate and government computer networks; the earliest it found was in
2006. Two years ago the numbers spiked. Mandiant discovered some of the
intrusions were long-running. On average the group would stay inside a
network, stealing data and passwords, for a year; in one case it had
access for four years and 10 months.
Mandiant has watched the group as it has stolen technology blueprints,
manufacturing processes, clinical trial results, pricing documents,
negotiation strategies and other proprietary information from more than
100 of its clients, mostly in the United States. Mandiant identified
attacks on 20 industries, from military contractors to chemical plants,
mining companies and satellite and telecommunications corporations.
Mandiant’s report does not name the victims, who usually insist on
anonymity. A 2009 attack on Coca-Cola coincided with the beverage
giant’s failed attempt to acquire the China Huiyuan Juice Group for $2.4
billion, according to people with knowledge of the results of the
company’s investigation.
As Coca-Cola executives were negotiating what would have been the
largest foreign purchase of a Chinese company, Comment Crew was busy
rummaging through their computers in an apparent effort to learn more
about Coca-Cola’s negotiation strategy.
The attack on Coca-Cola began, like hundreds before it, with a seemingly
innocuous e-mail to an executive that was, in fact, a spearphishing
attack. When the executive clicked on a malicious link in the e-mail, it
gave the attackers a foothold inside Coca-Cola’s network. From inside,
they sent confidential company files through a maze of computers back to
Shanghai, on a weekly basis, unnoticed.
Two years later, Comment Crew was one of at least three Chinese-based
groups to mount a similar attack on RSA, the computer security company
owned by EMC, a large technology company. It is best known for its
SecurID token, carried by employees at United States intelligence
agencies, military contractors and many major companies. (The New York
Times also uses the firm’s tokens to allow access to its e-mail and
production systems remotely.) RSA has offered to replace SecurID tokens
for customers and said it had added new layers of security to its
products.
As in the Coca-Cola case, the attack began with a targeted, cleverly
fashioned poisoned e-mail to an RSA employee. Two months later, hackers
breached Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor,
partly by using the information they gleaned from the RSA attack.
Mandiant is not the only private firm tracking Comment Crew. In 2011,
Joe Stewart, a Dell SecureWorks researcher, was analyzing malware used
in the RSA attack when he discovered that the attackers had used a
hacker tool to mask their true location.
When he reverse-engineered the tool, he found that the vast majority of
stolen data had been transferred to the same range of I.P. addresses
that Mandiant later identified in Shanghai.
Dell SecureWorks says it believed Comment Crew includes the same group
of attackers behind Operation Shady RAT, an extensive computer espionage
campaign uncovered in 2011 in which more than 70 organizations over a
five-year period, including the United Nations, government agencies in
the United States, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam were
targeted.
Infrastructure at Risk
What most worries American investigators is that the latest set of
attacks believed coming from Unit 61398 focus not just on stealing
information, but obtaining the ability to manipulate American critical
infrastructure: the power grids and other utilities.
Staff at Digital Bond, a small security firm that specializes in those
industrial-control computers, said that last June Comment Crew
unsuccessfully attacked it. A part-time employee at Digital Bond
received an e-mail that appeared to come from his boss, Dale Peterson.
The e-mail, in perfect English, discussed security weaknesses in
critical infrastructure systems, and asked the employee to click a link
to a document for more information. Mr. Peterson caught the e-mail and
shared it with other researchers, who found the link contained a
remote-access tool that would have given the attackers control over the
employee’s computer and potentially given them a front-row seat to
confidential information about Digital Bond’s clients, which include a
major water project, a power plant and a mining company.
Jaime Blasco, a security researcher at AlienVault, analyzed the computer
servers used in the attack, which led him to other victims, including
the Chertoff Group. That firm, headed by the former secretary of the
Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, has run simulations
of an extensive digital attack on the United States. Other attacks were
made on a contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,
and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, a lobbying group
that represents companies that make components for power grids. Those
organizations confirmed they were attacked but have said they prevented
attackers from gaining access to their network.
Mr. Blasco said that, based on the forensics, all the victims had been
hit by Comment Crew. But the most troubling attack to date, security
experts say, was a successful invasion of the Canadian arm of Telvent.
The company, now owned by Schneider Electric, designs software that
gives oil and gas pipeline companies and power grid operators remote
access to valves, switches and security systems.
Telvent keeps detailed blueprints on more than half of all the oil and
gas pipelines in North and South America, and has access to their
systems. In September, Telvent Canada told customers that attackers had
broken into its systems and taken project files. That access was
immediately cut, so that the intruders could not take command of the
systems.
Martin Hanna, a Schneider Electric spokesman, did not return requests
for comment, but security researchers who studied the malware used in
the attack, including Mr. Stewart at Dell SecureWorks and Mr. Blasco at
AlienVault, confirmed that the perpetrators were the Comment Crew.
“This is terrifying because — forget about the country — if someone
hired me and told me they wanted to have the offensive capability to
take out as many critical systems as possible, I would be going after
the vendors and do things like what happened to Telvent,“ Mr. Peterson
of Digital Bond said. “It’s the holy grail.”
Mr. Obama alluded to this concern in the State of the Union speech,
without mentioning China or any other nation. “We know foreign countries
and companies swipe our corporate secrets,” he said. “Now our enemies
are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial
institutions, our air-traffic control systems. We cannot look back years
from now and wonder why we did nothing.”
Mr. Obama faces a vexing choice: In a sprawling, vital relationship with
China, is it worth a major confrontation between the world’s largest
and second largest economy over computer hacking?
A few years ago, administration officials say, the theft of intellectual
property was an annoyance, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars
of revenue. But clearly something has changed. The mounting evidence of
state sponsorship, the increasing boldness of Unit 61398, and the
growing threat to American infrastructure are leading officials to
conclude that a far stronger response is necessary.
“Right now there is no incentive for the Chinese to stop doing this,”
said Mr. Rogers, the House intelligence chairman. “If we don’t create a
high price, it’s only going to keep accelerating.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/technology/chinas-army-is-seen-as-tied-to-hacking-against-us.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp
APT1: Exposing One of China's Cyber Espionage Units