Nest Of Spies

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Post: # 167015Unread post Blue Frost »

Antisemitic, more like stereotypical :teehe:
I have seen, and met quite a few Russians, some ugly, some gorgeous, and some just your average looking person like her in the photo.
Most where pretty darn nice until you meet the men, they where a bit on the A-hole side, or want to be tough guys. This one I was friends with was kind of cool, I think he used to be a spy for the KGB working in computers way back when.


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Post: # 167029Unread post Gary Oak »

They may have charm classes for their agents. I believe that the Chinese honey traps are very possibly trained in how to charm a man.
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Post: # 167078Unread post Blue Frost »

My guess it's easy to charm a man, I think the right one can charm the pants off me :blush: :blush: :blush:

:teehe:
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Post: # 167197Unread post Gary Oak »

I suspect that Chinese honeytraps are trained in how to lure men and manipulate them and it wouldn't suprise me if Russian honeytraps aren't trained as well by true experts. Did they learn anything from Japans geishas I wonder. This Butina isn't stunning but we can't see her body. perhaps she has a body that all guys would love to strip search.

Accused ‘Russian agent’ Butina subjected to excessive strip searches in US jail – embassy

The Russian embassy in the US has accused American authorities of subjecting jailed Russian gun activist and ‘agent’ Maria Butina to cruel and inhumane treatment, including unwarranted strip searches.
Butina was arrested and detained in Washington DC in July on espionage charges. The 29-year old is accused of acting as an agent of the Russian government without informing the US attorney general. Since her arrest, representatives of the Russian embassy have checked in on Butina, most recently visiting her on Thursday.

In a Facebook post, the embassy says Butina is being subjected to “psychological pressure and humiliation” as she awaits

Butina is being denied walks outdoors, and is strip searched after every visit with lawyers, embassy staff, and acquaintances. Butina is allegedly subjected to night checks every 15 minutes, a practice usually reserved for suicidal prisoners.

“There are attempts to break her will,” the embassy said, and announced that it would be sending an official complaint to the US State Department over Butina's treatment in jail.

Butina is allegedly being denied letters in her native Russian, as her jailers think they might contain “coded messages.” Embassy staff say that she has not been provided with an interpreter.

On an earlier visit, embassy staff raised concern that Butina was being denied proper medical care. This time, the situation is apparently much the same. A painful swelling on Butina’s leg – a result of her cell’s cold temperature – has not been treated, and the jailed activist is given only painkillers.

Read more
FILE PHOTO ‘In prison for advocating better US-Russia relation’: Butina lawyer on her ‘misunderstood’ case
Butina’s arrest was covered with glee by much of the American media, who published salacious stories, alleging that she traded sex for favors as she cosied up to Republican politicians. Likewise, the #FreeMariaButina social media campaign launched by the Russian Foreign Ministry was instantly hijacked with abusive and sexist comments.

“The hysteria in American social media, further flamed by Russophobic publications in the mainstream media, brings to mind the Salem Witch Trials,” read the embassy’s Facebook post.

Before falling victim to Washington’s anti-Russian crusade, Butina moved to the US on a student visa in 2016. She graduated from American University in Washington DC with a master’s degree in international relations earlier this year.

Butina is also the founder of Right to Bear Arms, a pro-gun organization that lobbies to change Russia’s strict gun laws. Right to Bear Arms has developed ties with the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the US. In addition, Butina met and socialized with several conservative political figures.

“Maria holds up strong, her determination to prove her innocence only grows more resilient,” read the embassy’s post. Staff also announced that they will be setting up a legal defense fund for Butina.

https://www.rt.com/usa/436170-russian-a ... -searched/
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Post: # 167557Unread post Gary Oak »

China looks to overwhelm nations with spies. If there are far too many for a country to keep track of then many will succeed in their activities.

China Using Fake LinkedIn Accounts to Recruit Americans as Spies

https://sputniknews.com/asia/2018083110 ... kedin-spy/

This paragraph from the second article explains why Chinese don't like host nation people speaking their language.

China has an advantage, in that there is a Chinese population in the Bay Area. The Chinese language is nearly impossible for anglophones to learn, and there is a real shortage of Chinese speakers, let alone ones that have completed the vetting process for intelligence and counterintelligence operations. So that is muddying the waters—prosecutions become very difficult, as does rolling up a spy line.

China’s Ministry of State Security Is Operating in Silicon Valley, Says Former Intel Officer

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-mi ... 37446.html
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Post: # 167562Unread post Blue Frost »

I couldn't learn any Chinese, sounds like someone chewing something, and talking.
German was more easy, but it's Anglo even if it's like someone hacking something up.
I wonder how natural born Chinese thinks of English =when they here it.
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Post: # 167567Unread post Gary Oak »

All students in China learn English. I speak Chinese fluently. Tagalog is difficult as is Russian. The Chinese tones are a problem for language learners but I found an easy way to learn them. Learning the tones seemed like downloading a tones program into my brain.
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Post: # 167572Unread post Blue Frost »

I was catching a lot of Korean when I used to go to Fort Knox, I even called a few out talking about people, and myself a few times.
It surprised the hell out of them, looked like the pet cat got caught eating the pet bird.
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Post: # 168398Unread post Gary Oak »

I believe that if a computer, smart phone etc....made in China is capable of having spyware in it then China has already been putting it in there. Huawei and ZTE are working with Chinese espionage and surely Justin Trudeau knows this yet he has welcomed them into Canada whereas the USA and Australia won't. The Americans warned Justin Trudeau but he always dismisses their warnings. He is clearly on the side of Canada and the west's enemies.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.
To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.

Image result for The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.
“Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow”
There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.
One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Still, to actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing a deep understanding of a product’s design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location—a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle. “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow,” says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. “Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.”




But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.
One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.


In emailed statements, Amazon (which announced its acquisition of Elemental in September 2015), Apple, and Supermicro disputed summaries of Bloomberg Businessweek’s reporting. “It’s untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental,” Amazon wrote. “On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, ‘hardware manipulations’ or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server,” Apple wrote. “We remain unaware of any such investigation,” wrote a spokesman for Supermicro, Perry Hayes. The Chinese government didn’t directly address questions about manipulation of Supermicro servers, issuing a statement that read, in part, “Supply chain safety in cyberspace is an issue of common concern, and China is also a victim.” The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representing the CIA and NSA, declined to comment.
Related:
Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, and Beijing
The Software Side of China’s Supply Chain Attack
Inside the Chinese Cyberspies’ Bag of Tech Tricks
The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation. One of those officials and two people inside AWS provided extensive information on how the attack played out at Elemental and Amazon; the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim. In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks. The sources were granted anonymity because of the sensitive, and in some cases classified, nature of the information.
One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.
The ramifications of the attack continue to play out. The Trump administration has made computer and networking hardware, including motherboards, a focus of its latest round of trade sanctions against China, and White House officials have made it clear they think companies will begin shifting their supply chains to other countries as a result. Such a shift might assuage officials who have been warning for years about the security of the supply chain—even though they’ve never disclosed a major reason for their concerns.
How the Hack Worked, According to U.S. Officials
Image result for The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
Illustrator: Scott Gelber
Back in 2006, three engineers in Oregon had a clever idea. Demand for mobile video was about to explode, and they predicted that broadcasters would be desperate to transform programs designed to fit TV screens into the various formats needed for viewing on smartphones, laptops, and other devices. To meet the anticipated demand, the engineers started Elemental Technologies, assembling what one former adviser to the company calls a genius team to write code that would adapt the superfast graphics chips being produced for high-end video-gaming machines. The resulting software dramatically reduced the time it took to process large video files. Elemental then loaded the software onto custom-built servers emblazoned with its leprechaun-green logos.
Elemental servers sold for as much as $100,000 each, at profit margins of as high as 70 percent, according to a former adviser to the company. Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.
Elemental also started working with American spy agencies. In 2009 the company announced a development partnership with In-Q-Tel Inc., the CIA’s investment arm, a deal that paved the way for Elemental servers to be used in national security missions across the U.S. government. Public documents, including the company’s own promotional materials, show that the servers have been used inside Department of Defense data centers to process drone and surveillance-camera footage, on Navy warships to transmit feeds of airborne missions, and inside government buildings to enable secure videoconferencing. NASA, both houses of Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security have also been customers. This portfolio made Elemental a target for foreign adversaries.
Supermicro had been an obvious choice to build Elemental’s servers. Headquartered north of San Jose’s airport, up a smoggy stretch of Interstate 880, the company was founded by Charles Liang, a Taiwanese engineer who attended graduate school in Texas and then moved west to start Supermicro with his wife in 1993. Silicon Valley was then embracing outsourcing, forging a pathway from Taiwanese, and later Chinese, factories to American consumers, and Liang added a comforting advantage: Supermicro’s motherboards would be engineered mostly in San Jose, close to the company’s biggest clients, even if the products were manufactured overseas.
Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.
The company’s pitch to customers hinges on unmatched customization, made possible by hundreds of full-time engineers and a catalog encompassing more than 600 designs. The majority of its workforce in San Jose is Taiwanese or Chinese, and Mandarin is the preferred language, with hanzi filling the whiteboards, according to six former employees. Chinese pastries are delivered every week, and many routine calls are done twice, once for English-only workers and again in Mandarin. The latter are more productive, according to people who’ve been on both. These overseas ties, especially the widespread use of Mandarin, would have made it easier for China to gain an understanding of Supermicro’s operations and potentially to infiltrate the company. (A U.S. official says the government’s probe is still examining whether spies were planted inside Supermicro or other American companies to aid the attack.)
With more than 900 customers in 100 countries by 2015, Supermicro offered inroads to a bountiful collection of sensitive targets. “Think of Supermicro as the Microsoft of the hardware world,” says a former U.S. intelligence official who’s studied Supermicro and its business model. “Attacking Supermicro motherboards is like attacking Windows. It’s like attacking the whole world.”
The security of the global technology supply chain had been compromised, even if consumers and most companies didn’t know it yet
Well before evidence of the attack surfaced inside the networks of U.S. companies, American intelligence sources were reporting that China’s spies had plans to introduce malicious microchips into the supply chain. The sources weren’t specific, according to a person familiar with the information they provided, and millions of motherboards are shipped into the U.S. annually. But in the first half of 2014, a different person briefed on high-level discussions says, intelligence officials went to the White House with something more concrete: China’s military was preparing to insert the chips into Supermicro motherboards bound for U.S. companies.
The specificity of the information was remarkable, but so were the challenges it posed. Issuing a broad warning to Supermicro’s customers could have crippled the company, a major American hardware maker, and it wasn’t clear from the intelligence whom the operation was targeting or what its ultimate aims were. Plus, without confirmation that anyone had been attacked, the FBI was limited in how it could respond. The White House requested periodic updates as information came in, the person familiar with the discussions says.
Apple made its discovery of suspicious chips inside Supermicro servers around May 2015, after detecting odd network activity and firmware problems, according to a person familiar with the timeline. Two of the senior Apple insiders say the company reported the incident to the FBI but kept details about what it had detected tightly held, even internally. Government investigators were still chasing clues on their own when Amazon made its discovery and gave them access to sabotaged hardware, according to one U.S. official. This created an invaluable opportunity for intelligence agencies and the FBI—by then running a full investigation led by its cyber- and counterintelligence teams—to see what the chips looked like and how they worked.
The chips on Elemental servers were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, according to one person who saw a detailed report prepared for Amazon by its third-party security contractor, as well as a second person who saw digital photos and X-ray images of the chips incorporated into a later report prepared by Amazon’s security team. Gray or off-white in color, they looked more like signal conditioning couplers, another common motherboard component, than microchips, and so they were unlikely to be detectable without specialized equipment. Depending on the board model, the chips varied slightly in size, suggesting that the attackers had supplied different factories with different batches.
Officials familiar with the investigation say the primary role of implants such as these is to open doors that other attackers can go through. “Hardware attacks are about access,” as one former senior official puts it. In simplified terms, the implants on Supermicro hardware manipulated the core operating instructions that tell the server what to do as data move across a motherboard, two people familiar with the chips’ operation say. This happened at a crucial moment, as small bits of the operating system were being stored in the board’s temporary memory en route to the server’s central processor, the CPU. The implant was placed on the board in a way that allowed it to effectively edit this information queue, injecting its own code or altering the order of the instructions the CPU was meant to follow. Deviously small changes could create disastrous effects.
Since the implants were small, the amount of code they contained was small as well. But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code. The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off.
This system could let the attackers alter how the device functioned, line by line, however they wanted, leaving no one the wiser. To understand the power that would give them, take this hypothetical example: Somewhere in the Linux operating system, which runs in many servers, is code that authorizes a user by verifying a typed password against a stored encrypted one. An implanted chip can alter part of that code so the server won’t check for a password—and presto! A secure machine is open to any and all users. A chip can also steal encryption keys for secure communications, block security updates that would neutralize the attack, and open up new pathways to the internet. Should some anomaly be noticed, it would likely be cast as an unexplained oddity. “The hardware opens whatever door it wants,” says Joe FitzPatrick, founder of Hardware Security Resources LLC, a company that trains cybersecurity professionals in hardware hacking techniques.
U.S. officials had caught China experimenting with hardware tampering before, but they’d never seen anything of this scale and ambition. The security of the global technology supply chain had been compromised, even if consumers and most companies didn’t know it yet. What remained for investigators to learn was how the attackers had so thoroughly infiltrated Supermicro’s production process—and how many doors they’d opened into American targets.
Unlike software-based hacks, hardware manipulation creates a real-world trail. Components leave a wake of shipping manifests and invoices. Boards have serial numbers that trace to specific factories. To track the corrupted chips to their source, U.S. intelligence agencies began following Supermicro’s serpentine supply chain in reverse, a person briefed on evidence gathered during the probe says.
As recently as 2016, according to DigiTimes, a news site specializing in supply chain research, Supermicro had three primary manufacturers constructing its motherboards, two headquartered in Taiwan and one in Shanghai. When such suppliers are choked with big orders, they sometimes parcel out work to subcontractors. In order to get further down the trail, U.S. spy agencies drew on the prodigious tools at their disposal. They sifted through communications intercepts, tapped informants in Taiwan and China, even tracked key individuals through their phones, according to the person briefed on evidence gathered during the probe. Eventually, that person says, they traced the malicious chips to four subcontracting factories that had been building Supermicro motherboards for at least two years.
As the agents monitored interactions among Chinese officials, motherboard manufacturers, and middlemen, they glimpsed how the seeding process worked. In some cases, plant managers were approached by people who claimed to represent Supermicro or who held positions suggesting a connection to the government. The middlemen would request changes to the motherboards’ original designs, initially offering bribes in conjunction with their unusual requests. If that didn’t work, they threatened factory managers with inspections that could shut down their plants. Once arrangements were in place, the middlemen would organize delivery of the chips to the factories.
The investigators concluded that this intricate scheme was the work of a People’s Liberation Army unit specializing in hardware attacks, according to two people briefed on its activities. The existence of this group has never been revealed before, but one official says, “We’ve been tracking these guys for longer than we’d like to admit.” The unit is believed to focus on high-priority targets, including advanced commercial technology and the computers of rival militaries. In past attacks, it targeted the designs for high-performance computer chips and computing systems of large U.S. internet providers.
Provided details of Businessweek’s reporting, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a statement that said “China is a resolute defender of cybersecurity.” The ministry added that in 2011, China proposed international guarantees on hardware security along with other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security body. The statement concluded, “We hope parties make less gratuitous accusations and suspicions but conduct more constructive talk and collaboration so that we can work together in building a peaceful, safe, open, cooperative and orderly cyberspace.”
The Supermicro attack was on another order entirely from earlier episodes attributed to the PLA. It threatened to have reached a dizzying array of end users, with some vital ones in the mix. Apple, for its part, has used Supermicro hardware in its data centers sporadically for years, but the relationship intensified after 2013, when Apple acquired a startup called Topsy Labs, which created superfast technology for indexing and searching vast troves of internet content. By 2014, the startup was put to work building small data centers in or near major global cities. This project, known internally as Ledbelly, was designed to make the search function for Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, faster, according to the three senior Apple insiders.
Documents seen by Businessweek show that in 2014, Apple planned to order more than 6,000 Supermicro servers for installation in 17 locations, including Amsterdam, Chicago, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, Singapore, and Tokyo, plus 4,000 servers for its existing North Carolina and Oregon data centers. Those orders were supposed to double, to 20,000, by 2015. Ledbelly made Apple an important Supermicro customer at the exact same time the PLA was found to be manipulating the vendor’s hardware.
Project delays and early performance problems meant that around 7,000 Supermicro servers were humming in Apple’s network by the time the company’s security team found the added chips. Because Apple didn’t, according to a U.S. official, provide government investigators with access to its facilities or the tampered hardware, the extent of the attack there remained outside their view.

American investigators eventually figured out who else had been hit. Since the implanted chips were designed to ping anonymous computers on the internet for further instructions, operatives could hack those computers to identify others who’d been affected. Although the investigators couldn’t be sure they’d found every victim, a person familiar with the U.S. probe says they ultimately concluded that the number was almost 30 companies.

That left the question of whom to notify and how. U.S. officials had been warning for years that hardware made by two Chinese telecommunications giants, Huawei Corp. and ZTE Corp., was subject to Chinese government manipulation. (Both Huawei and ZTE have said no such tampering has occurred.) But a similar public alert regarding a U.S. company was out of the question. Instead, officials reached out to a small number of important Supermicro customers. One executive of a large web-hosting company says the message he took away from the exchange was clear: Supermicro’s hardware couldn’t be trusted. “That’s been the nudge to everyone—get that crap out,” the person says.
Amazon, for its part, began acquisition talks with an Elemental competitor, but according to one person familiar with Amazon’s deliberations, it reversed course in the summer of 2015 after learning that Elemental’s board was nearing a deal with another buyer. Amazon announced its acquisition of Elemental in September 2015, in a transaction whose value one person familiar with the deal places at $350 million. Multiple sources say that Amazon intended to move Elemental’s software to AWS’s cloud, whose chips, motherboards, and servers are typically designed in-house and built by factories that Amazon contracts from directly.
A notable exception was AWS’s data centers inside China, which were filled with Supermicro-built servers, according to two people with knowledge of AWS’s operations there. Mindful of the Elemental findings, Amazon’s security team conducted its own investigation into AWS’s Beijing facilities and found altered motherboards there as well, including more sophisticated designs than they’d previously encountered. In one case, the malicious chips were thin enough that they’d been embedded between the layers of fiberglass onto which the other components were attached, according to one person who saw pictures of the chips. That generation of chips was smaller than a sharpened pencil tip, the person says. (Amazon denies that AWS knew of servers found in China containing malicious chips.)
China has long been known to monitor banks, manufacturers, and ordinary citizens on its own soil, and the main customers of AWS’s China cloud were domestic companies or foreign entities with operations there. Still, the fact that the country appeared to be conducting those operations inside Amazon’s cloud presented the company with a Gordian knot. Its security team determined that it would be difficult to quietly remove the equipment and that, even if they could devise a way, doing so would alert the attackers that the chips had been found, according to a person familiar with the company’s probe. Instead, the team developed a method of monitoring the chips. In the ensuing months, they detected brief check-in communications between the attackers and the sabotaged servers but didn’t see any attempts to remove data. That likely meant either that the attackers were saving the chips for a later operation or that they’d infiltrated other parts of the network before the monitoring began. Neither possibility was reassuring.
When in 2016 the Chinese government was about to pass a new cybersecurity law—seen by many outside the country as a pretext to give authorities wider access to sensitive data—Amazon decided to act, the person familiar with the company’s probe says. In August it transferred operational control of its Beijing data center to its local partner, Beijing Sinnet, a move the companies said was needed to comply with the incoming law. The following November, Amazon sold the entire infrastructure to Beijing Sinnet for about $300 million. The person familiar with Amazon’s probe casts the sale as a choice to “hack off the diseased limb.”
As for Apple, one of the three senior insiders says that in the summer of 2015, a few weeks after it identified the malicious chips, the company started removing all Supermicro servers from its data centers, a process Apple referred to internally as “going to zero.” Every Supermicro server, all 7,000 or so, was replaced in a matter of weeks, the senior insider says. (Apple denies that any servers were removed.) In 2016, Apple informed Supermicro that it was severing their relationship entirely—a decision a spokesman for Apple ascribed in response to Businessweek’s questions to an unrelated and relatively minor security incident.
That August, Supermicro’s CEO, Liang, revealed that the company had lost two major customers. Although he didn’t name them, one was later identified in news reports as Apple. He blamed competition, but his explanation was vague. “When customers asked for lower price, our people did not respond quickly enough,” he said on a conference call with analysts. Hayes, the Supermicro spokesman, says the company has never been notified of the existence of malicious chips on its motherboards by either customers or U.S. law enforcement.
Concurrent with the illicit chips’ discovery in 2015 and the unfolding investigation, Supermicro has been plagued by an accounting problem, which the company characterizes as an issue related to the timing of certain revenue recognition. After missing two deadlines to file quarterly and annual reports required by regulators, Supermicro was delisted from the Nasdaq on Aug. 23 of this year. It marked an extraordinary stumble for a company whose annual revenue had risen sharply in the previous four years, from a reported $1.5 billion in 2014 to a projected $3.2 billion this year.
One Friday in late September 2015, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared together at the White House for an hourlong press conference headlined by a landmark deal on cybersecurity. After months of negotiations, the U.S. had extracted from China a grand promise: It would no longer support the theft by hackers of U.S. intellectual property to benefit Chinese companies. Left out of those pronouncements, according to a person familiar with discussions among senior officials across the U.S. government, was the White House’s deep concern that China was willing to offer this concession because it was already developing far more advanced and surreptitious forms of hacking founded on its near monopoly of the technology supply chain.
In the weeks after the agreement was announced, the U.S. government quietly raised the alarm with several dozen tech executives and investors at a small, invite-only meeting in McLean, Va., organized by the Pentagon. According to someone who was present, Defense Department officials briefed the technologists on a recent attack and asked them to think about creating commercial products that could detect hardware implants. Attendees weren’t told the name of the hardware maker involved, but it was clear to at least some in the room that it was Supermicro, the person says.
The problem under discussion wasn’t just technological. It spoke to decisions made decades ago to send advanced production work to Southeast Asia. In the intervening years, low-cost Chinese manufacturing had come to underpin the business models of many of America’s largest technology companies. Early on, Apple, for instance, made many of its most sophisticated electronics domestically. Then in 1992, it closed a state-of-the-art plant for motherboard and computer assembly in Fremont, Calif., and sent much of that work overseas.
Over the decades, the security of the supply chain became an article of faith despite repeated warnings by Western officials. A belief formed that China was unlikely to jeopardize its position as workshop to the world by letting its spies meddle in its factories. That left the decision about where to build commercial systems resting largely on where capacity was greatest and cheapest. “You end up with a classic Satan’s bargain,” one former U.S. official says. “You can have less supply than you want and guarantee it’s secure, or you can have the supply you need, but there will be risk. Every organization has accepted the second proposition.”
In the three years since the briefing in McLean, no commercially viable way to detect attacks like the one on Supermicro’s motherboards has emerged—or has looked likely to emerge. Few companies have the resources of Apple and Amazon, and it took some luck even for them to spot the problem. “This stuff is at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, and there is no easy technological solution,” one of the people present in McLean says. “You have to invest in things that the world wants. You cannot invest in things that the world is not ready to accept yet.”

http://chinawatchcanada.blogspot.com/20 ... -chip.html
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Post: # 168407Unread post Blue Frost »

I'm sure they have their own stuff installed in them, the US has two I have read about it the past put in any Microsoft based computer.
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Post: # 168421Unread post Gary Oak »

The Chinese are quite successful in spite of some shortcomings due to the connections of their tongs, syndicates, triads etc....

Chinese man charged with US aviation 'espionage'

The indictment identifies GE Aviation as a target of the operation

The US justice department has announced charges of economic espionage against a suspected Chinese intelligence officer.

Officials say Yanjun Xu tried to steal trade secrets from US aviation and aerospace companies on behalf of China.

He was arrested in Belgium earlier this year and on Tuesday extradited to the US.

On Thursday, Beijing dismissed the espionage accusations against the official, saying there was no basis to the charges.

China said it hoped the US would safeguard the legal rights of the Chinese individual, a foreign ministry spokesman said at a regular news briefing.

A senior US justice department official said the case was "part of an overall economic policy of developing China at American expense".

"We cannot tolerate a nation's stealing our firepower and the fruits of our brainpower," Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers added.
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Prosecutors say Mr Xu is a senior officer with China's ministry of state security - which is responsible for counter-intelligence, foreign intelligence and political security.

He was detained in Belgium on 1 April at the request of the US. He was later indicted by an Ohio grand jury on four charges of conspiring to commit economic espionage and attempting to steal trade secrets.

The indictment was unsealed on Wednesday following the suspect's extradition.

Presentational white space
Prosecutors allege that from 2013 Mr Xu targeted leading aviation companies as well as industry experts to obtain "highly sensitive" technical information.


A woman photographs a GE engine inside Qatar Airways aeroplaneImage copyright AFP
Image caption
GE Aviation produces thousands of commercial and military jet engines every year

They say he invited employees to travel to China for an "exchange of ideas" or under the guise of delivering university presentations.

Ohio-based aircraft engine giant GE Aviation was identified as one of the targets of the alleged operation.

Conspiracy and attempt to commit economic espionage carries a maximum US prison sentence of 15 years, and conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets can carry a 10-year term.

The charges come at a time of raised tension between the US and China.

The two countries have become embroiled in an escalating trade war and President Trump has accused Beijing of trying to meddle in the upcoming mid-term elections.

In a speech last week, US Vice-President Mike Pence accused Beijing of directing "its bureaucrats and businesses to obtain American intellectual property - the foundation of our economic leadership - by any means necessary".

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45817714
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Post: # 168495Unread post Gary Oak »

I doubt that Beijing has to threaten overseas Chinese to spy for China. CSIS has found that China doesn't expect to even have to pay them and they will do it for free. Are they not a fifth collumn in the countries that they enjoy the benefits of living in ? I prefer immigrants that like Canada and Canadians.

Beijing could be threatening ethnic Chinese abroad to become spies: US report

A report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission has stated that Beijing could be using threat tactics against ethnic Chinese communities living abroad to turn them into its spies.
In the report published for a US congressional body, it is highlighted that threat to families of ethnic Chinese like Uygurs are being made to ensure the spy network is strengthened. It is also possible that such tactics are being increasingly employed to increase loyalty to the Communist Party - both in China and in foreign countries.
A number of anti-China protests in foreign countries in recent times - especially those which seek to highlight Beijing's poor treatment of minority communities - may have perturbed officials in Beijing who are now looking to establish their country as a soft power in the eyes of the world. Uygurs are one such community in particular with global reports suggesting that close to a million have been forced into re-education camps. These are charges that have been vehemently denied by Beijing and the state-controlled media there.
The report, based on media findings and interviews with strategy experts, says that it is possible that people living abroad are being coerced to spy for China by threatening that their families back home would be dispatched to camps. It goes on to highlight that while not all campus organisations of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) abroad are officially affiliated to the Chinese government, there are many which indeed are. These are then used to carry out protests in foreign countries each time that particular country does something contrary to Chinese interests. The invitation to Dalai Lama by University of San Diego last year has been referred to as one such instance when CSSA reportedly organised protests.

http://chinawatchcanada.blogspot.com/20 ... thnic.html
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Post: # 168526Unread post Blue Frost »

If they have family still in Chinese territory i can see it, they have been doing that for a long time now.
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Post: # 168527Unread post Gary Oaktree »

I also have known about the Chinese threatening to harm family members for a long time too. It only costs about forty dollars to get someone killed in China. The triads also like to threaten to harm girls families if they don’t be prostitutes for them. China is an evil mafia culture.
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Post: # 170833Unread post Gary Oak »

Justin Trudeau's selling Canada out to China by allowing Huawei to control Canada's 5-G networks is unforgiveable.

How arrest of Chinese ‘princess’ exposes regime’s world domination plot

Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Vancouver on Dec. 6 led to immediate blowback.

Furious Chinese Communists have begun arresting innocent Canadians in retaliation. So far, three of these “revenge hostages” have been taken and are being held in secret jails on vague charges. Beijing hints that the hostage count may grow if Meng is not freed and fast.

Even for a thuggish regime like China’s, this kind of action is almost unprecedented.

So who is Meng Wanzhou?

Currently under house arrest and awaiting extradition to the US, she will face charges that her company violated US sanctions by doing business with Iran and committed bank fraud by disguising the payments it received in return.

But to say that she is the CFO of Huawei doesn’t begin to explain her importance — or China’s reaction.

It turns out that “Princess” Meng, as she is called, is Communist royalty. Her grandfather was a close comrade of Chairman Mao during the Chinese Civil War, who went on to become vice governor of China’s largest province.

She is also the daughter of Huawei’s founder and chairman, Ren Zhengfei. Daddy is grooming her to succeed him when he retires.

In other words, Meng is the heiress apparent of China’s largest and most advanced high-tech company, one which plays a key role in China’s grand strategy of global domination.

Huawei is a leader in 5G technology and, earlier this year, surpassed Apple to become the second-largest smartphone maker in the world behind Samsung.

But Huawei is much more than an innocent manufacturer of smartphones.

It is a spy agency of the Chinese Communist Party.

How do we know?

Because the party has repeatedly said so.

First in 2015 and then again in June 2017, the party declared that all Chinese companies must collaborate in gathering intelligence.

“All organizations and citizens,” reads Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.”

All Chinese companies, whether they are private or owned by the state, are now part and parcel of the party’s massive overseas espionage campaign.

Huawei is a key part of this aggressive effort to spy on the rest of the world. The company’s smartphones, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, can be used to “maliciously modify or steal information,” as well as “conduct undetected espionage.” Earlier this year the Pentagon banned the devices from all US military bases worldwide.

But Huawei, which has been specially designated as a “national champion,” has an even more important assignment from the Communist Party than simply listening in on phone conversations.

As a global leader in 5G technology, it has been tasked with installing 5G “fiber to the phone” networks in countries around the world.

In fact, “Made in China 2025” — the party’s aggressive plan to dominate the cutting-edge technologies of the 21st century — singles out Huawei as the key to achieving global 5G dominance.

Any network system installed by a company working hand-in-glove with China’s intelligence services raises the danger of not only cyber espionage, but also cyber-enabled technology theft.

And the danger doesn’t stop there.

The new superfast 5G networks, which are 100 times faster than 4G, will literally run the world of the future. Everything from smartphones to smart cities, from self-driving vehicles to, yes, even weapons systems, will be under their control.

In other words, whoever controls the 5G networks will control the world — or at least large parts of it.

Huawei has reportedly secured more than 25 commercial contracts for 5G, but has been locked out of an increasing number of countries around the world because of spying concerns.

The “Five Eyes” — Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the US — over the past year have waged a concerted campaign to block the Chinese tech giant from dominating next-generation wireless networks around the world. Not only have they largely kept Huawei out of their own countries, they have convinced other countries like Japan, India and Germany to go along, too.

Whoever controls the 5G networks will control the world — or at least large parts of it.

Yet Huawei is far from finished. The company has grown into a global brand over the past two decades because, as a “national champion,” it is constantly being fed and nourished by the party and the military with low-interest-rate loans, privileged access to a protected domestic market, and other preferential treatment.

These various state subsidies continue, giving Huawei a huge and unfair advantage over its free-market competitors.

Huawei stands in the same relationship to the Chinese Communist Party as German steelmaker Alfried Krupp did to Germany’s National Socialists in the days leading up to World War II.

Just as Germany’s leading supplier of armaments basically became an arm of the Nazi machine after war broke out, so is China’s leading high-tech company an essential element of the party’s cold war plan to dominate the world of the future.

As far as “Princess” Meng is concerned, I expect that she will be found guilty of committing bank fraud, ordered to pay a fine, and then released. Even a billion-dollar fine would be chump change for a $75 billion corporation like Huawei.

The real payoff of her arrest lies elsewhere. It has exposed the massive campaign of espionage that Huawei is carrying out around the world at the behest of the party. It has revealed how that party dreams of a new world order in which China, not America, is dominant.

The two Chinese characters that make up Huawei’s name literally mean, “To Serve China.” That’s clear enough, isn’t it?

Steven W. Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order.”

http://chinawatchcanada.blogspot.com/20 ... poses.html
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Post: # 171252Unread post Gary Oak »

The USA warned Canada not to allow Huawei in as it's so obviously Chinese espionage but Justin Trudeau ever the sleazy rebel allowed them in and they will be doing whatever they can get away with espionagewise. No doubt they donated millions of dollars to the Trudeau Foundation.

Huawei sales directoPoland has arrested a sales director for Chinese telecoms giant Huawei over allegations of working with Beijing’s intelligence services. Huawei is facing increased spying accusations from the US and its allies.


Along with the Chinese national, whose name has been reported as Weijinga W., the Polish counterintelligence service, the Internal Security Agency (ABW), arrested Polish national Piotr D., the ABW’s own former employee, Polish broadcaster TVP reports. Both are accused of espionage.

A Huawei spokesman has said the company is aware of the arrest, but has made no further comment.

Spying, and working in concert with the Chinese government, are the two chief allegations several Western nations are leveling against Huawei, which recently overtook Apple as the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer.

Following US lead? Gavin Williamson expresses ‘deep concerns’ about Huawei assisting on 5G network Following US lead? Gavin Williamson expresses ‘deep concerns’ about Huawei assisting on 5G network

The US has been cracking down on Huawei products, accusing the company of building backdoors for spying into its phones. Along with most of its allies in the “Five Eyes” group – Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK – it has barred Huawei from assisting in building 5G networks.

The US-Huawei spat was kicked up a notch with the December arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada. Meng is fighting extradition to the US, where she is wanted on charges of violating sanctions against Iran.

The escalation comes amid an unresolved trade war between Washington and Beijing, and US President Donald Trump has been clear that he is ready to use Meng as a bargaining chip to secure a better deal.

Poland is one of the most devout US allies in Europe. While at odds with Washington’s other European friends over migration, judicial reforms and other issues, Warsaw is constantly seeking to reinforce its ties with the US itself. It has agreed to house a US missile defense installation, and is now reportedly mulling housing
r arrested in Poland over spying allegations

https://www.rt.com/news/448567-poland-h ... st-spying/
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Post: # 178081Unread post Gary Oak »

No doubt Shi and many of his coconspirators are “fan Qing fu Ming” sworn tong members while they enjoy not having to live under China’s rule. I expect some loyalty to the country that lets an immigrant in. https://www.zdnet.com/article/engineer- ... -to-china/
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Post: # 180968Unread post Gary Oak »

I was asked when I was in China and I have reasons to believe that this is very common. https://chinawatchcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... ynMwls&m=1

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Post: # 181035Unread post Blue Frost »

I like how the people in Hong Kong caught the fake Chinese police, and infiltrators in their mist.
i feel bad for the Chinese guy that was acting like a cop because he's just following orders, but don't blame the people of Hong Kong for about beating him to death.
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Post: # 181081Unread post Gary Oak »

None of this came as a big surprise to me. No doubt they are operating in Canada in the same way. In the USA however it’s not nearly as easy fortunately because of the USA goes down the whole world will be a horrible place.
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