FBI Fears Chinese Hackers Have Back Door Into US Government & Military

You want to know why they're not protecting anything? I'll tell you. It's because we're sending out false information so that when the Chinese hack into our systems, they'll think what they're getting is the real deal.

First of all Impreza has a good point. Why not just open a medium-security fake server for hackers to munch on?
Maybe not everyone can be tricked by this, but who knows.


The U.S. government fears the Chinese because of Chinese funds pouring into the American treasury helping to fight the pitiful Iraq war and other military conquests. The government owes close to 1 trillion dollars to the Chinese now, and if they piss off China too much China would want the money back becasue China could and will if they have to.

If EVERYONE boycotts Chinese goods in the U.S. then where will the replacement goods come from? Don't say the U.S. because people want 10 to 20 times the wage of an average Chinese worker to produce barely 50% of daily yields of the workers.

Mexico? Do you really want the NWO?
India? Heck they need to feed their own country first.
Africa? Nope, it's dominated by Chinese agriculture.

Who else is there?

[edit on 4/21/2008 by die_another_day]

Counterfeit products from China is not new, and is not the point in this thread. The point is the 'backdoor' which isn't there. Hardware is simply the conduit of the information, you still need to breach firewalls, app security, and o/s security to get to the data within the system. From my 19+ years in the IT field I would be much more concerned with a fire risk in my data center from one of these knock-off devices than the security breach potential. It SHOULD be common practice to remove all default settings from a network device and ensuring all settings are configured to your network needs prior to installation, not blindly pulling a device out of the box and pligging it into your network. This would remove any potential security vulnerabilities to some extent.

Alarming no doubt. China knows our military depends on computer networked devices more than any other.

Buying any Cisco products made from China is just dumb. Most of our electronics are made there. Did you every wonder how many non-military computers have backdoors in them, through hardware settings or otherwise? Too dam many.

System boards are made in China. The BIOS chip on these boards are made there .. easy to have the OS open up a network connection when triggered, thinking it is supposed to because the BIOS claims it has this port open for this card etc.

We should have never engaged China ..dumbest thing we could have done.

Sure, we have hackers too, but China only has one uniform network. The US is has all kinds of different subnets, gateways etc. The disadvantage to such disparate networks in the US is they are all on a different page and thus much easier to hack. What's more if you can get into one IP range, you can find machines behind the Gateway that got you into that subnet.

The two easiest ways into a network are through e-mail or a web server. You can hack port 80 all day long, no firewall. Once you compromise an admin script that some administrator didn't apply the correct permissions to (if any), you have access to the command line through port 80.

Networks are only as good as their administrators.

Replace that dam hardware!

Well, somebody (reasonably) high in the hierarchy is finally noticing.

FBI's problems are shared by all the other U.S. government agencies, though in somewhat different forms.

China is well aware (as is U.S. and every other serious government out there, but they don't admit it because all hell would break loose) of a very high probability of resource/energy wars occuring by the middle of this century.

Oil, food, water... all of them strategic resources, and all of them very, very limited in an expanding world. "The survival of the fittest", and all that crap we were taught in schools, remember?

What China is doing is a simple strategic move - collect all the information you can about your enemy, send (electronic) spies and (electronic) sleepers over to the enemy, observe and... wait. The moment will eventually come to use those sleepers to bring down enemy's communication lines.

In case you are not aware, communication lines are the first casualties, and The Primary Targets of any war. Make your enemy blind and deaf, and he cannot defend himself.

People should read "The Art of War" at least once in their lives. There is absolutely nothing new in such strategy. It's been around for at least 500 years (and much longer in the forgotten history). The means change, but the strategies are forever.

Here are just a few examples of what other agencies and foreign governments are facing:

www.techzi.net...

On the bright side, it seems that at least some of my posts have caught attention of some of the alphabet agencies out there. A very specific thread on another forum got deleted (which is something that has never happened there in almost 3 years) which dealt with exactly this problem with China. Well, actually, it was a mixed bag of different matters, but the main point was the recent downing of that U.S. spy satelite which stopped working for unknown reasons (the one U.S. had to shoot down).

This is just my wild guess, but I have a feeling Chinese were experimenting with directed EMP, and simply missed one of their own satelites. Well, mistakes happen... like the one with the first low orbit test of nuclear weapons in 50's (or was it 60's...? I'm too lazy to look it up right now ) when U.S. immediatelly (and unintentionally) destroyed 2 of its own spy satelites, and badly damaged a couple of others (also U.S.).

In some matters, China is way "ahead" of U.S. They don't have to worry about intellectual rights (or even human rights for that matter), they have absolute control of their part of the Internet (through The Great Firewall of China), have almost perfectly controlled society (they can relocate a milion people in a month, how's that for efficiency?!), and they are smart (at least several thousands of years of history behind them).

What I've just described is every secret society's perfect dream... which makes me wonder if U.S. is being staged for takeover. Or, to put it in the right context - "liberation by the superior Chinese culture". I've heard something about that propaganda being used in Tibet takeover. Not that Tibet was much better in treating its own people (they had a debt slave system almost exactly the same you have in the U.S. right now; what a historical coincidence!), but two wrongs don't make it right.

The strategies being played out on this planet are so interesting... and dumb, but that's what makes them so interesting.

[edit on 22-4-2008 by elendal]

Some good stuff Elan ..

What we have is a perfect storm brewing between 3 major dynamics.

-The Islamic exetremist dynamic with Iran as the center
-The 'free world' version of the NWO. Call it NWO Blue with US as hub
-The Communist NWO version or NWO Red with China as the hub

The three cyclones are about to converge. Once Cyclone (the US NWO initiative) fed the Chinese Cyclone (The Red NWO initiative).

Both the above are feeding the Islamic Cyclone through Oil!

There only had to be one, but feeding the other one brought on the third and now you have bigger storm with different moving parts.

Are there any signs that the Chinese government may have used the kind of information they could extract from these weak-spots? Anything happen recently that reeks of insider knowledge? The proof in this theory will be provided by its consequences, anyone noticed anything?

reply to post by die_another_day


just a thought from my angle
Indonesia

What on earth is e-Bay doing showing up in an FBI investigation of US government procurement of network routers? Surely this is some sort of joke, no?

reply to post by jankopernik


while I do tend to agree with you, I didn't see the schematics of the device that well. It is possible to insert code to go out and download new firmware once its been in operation for say 4 months. Additionally that code could be hidden in the BIOS, or firmware, or theoretically etched into the processor itself.

Yes it would be hard, but realistically, most of chinese manufacturing is owned and operated by the chinese military. The have motive, support, and cause to get access to our networks.

While these are fakes, which for quality reasons is a good enough reason to replace. If infact it did have a back door on the router, this could cause issues.

Lets says you get into the router, and from there you modify the access list to allow you access to the server that was housing 50 top secret documents on it. Once the server is hacked, you can turn around and install keystroke monitor, as well as a packet sniffer that gave you the name, ip, and port that other devices connected to that server.

From there you copy the password file over to your computer in china, then turn around and run "john the ripper" or some other cracker software to get the passwords.

No you have the usernames and passwords, the ips, ports of other computers, a cracked top secret server, and the ability to gain even more access.

Its all about baby steps.

The government is wise to try and nip this in the butt at the core. Once the routers are replaced, passwords need changed, the servers need to be thoroughly checked.

Cheers,

Camain

Originally posted by downtown436
100,000,000,000$

That's how big this problem is. Who is going to pay to fix it?

If the taxpayers have to fix it, buy Cisco systems stock.

If Cisco has to pay for it, buy Cisco put options.

Wow, now that's thinking like Cramer. So, how does one find out who is going to fix it? Will it be on the news, or c-span, or will it be a matter of digging through gubment files?
My guess is that the taxpayer is footing this bill because the government was cutting corners.

Just wanted to add further evidence that this is not just a problem in the US. I am a engineer working in Australia, was told by a CISCO guy a while a guy that they they purchased one of these routers to see how the chinese could make them so cheap. When they got into the device they found that the router had a cisco iso, even had the cisco tracker byte. Everything about it was cisco apart from the fact that it was a cheap knock off.

This ATS thread has been picked up by SlashDot where there are quite a few interesting comments and concerns by IT professionals.

reply to post by gottago



No. If you read the report closely you'll see it also contains information about non government purchases, those transactions were apparently facilitated on Ebay.

Springer...

This was caught by duplicate MAC addresses, SN#, and the inability to perform a firmware upgrade. A call to Cisco should ID duplicate numbers, and it's always a good idea to update your firmware before deploying.
I'm curious if they actually found any backdoors installed, or are just realizing the possibility. New firmware must verify the checksums of the current firmware. and find it to be different. What exactly was added? A super whitelist?
A second, hidden, enable password? Or some packet sniffing? Or just an easily executed DOS attack ready to be triggered on a large scale?

They should send these to Cisco for forensic analysis.

As of now it is just a case of what if's. The computers themselves weren't counterfit so there is not hidden code in the BIOS. And we don't know how good their security software is. If a backdoor opens, it opens in the router, you still have to get into the pc and if they set up their machines right, whoever does come in that backdoor has to know the passwords and somehow remain undected when they actually attempt to breach. Not to mention, we don't even know how segmented different levels of intelligence are kept. Since this isn't the first run in with hackers for the govt, the most important stuff probably isn't even connected to the internet, I'd imagine they have a lot of pc's on floor wide networks or building wide networks.

Sounds to me it is just a cheap way to make money and these routers are all over the place with duplicate mac addresses and SN#'s so how do they know which router to access. When they do find the router how do we know they are capable of accessing the pc, when they access the pc how do we know how much access they have. But no paranoid speculation is needed, if they did manage to do all of that, then there are footprints and trails. They will no doubt find evidence. If in the end all they can link this theory to is a number of counterfeit routers then we'll know there was no hacking going on. As of now they havn't found any evidence otherwise.

[edit on 22-4-2008 by Sheeper]

I'm not that surprised "China's fakes" is a real problem & growing each year that's passing.

The average Joe has not been forgotten as well:

HP recently announced viruses were found in their "USB Floppy Drive Key (256 Mo- 1 Gb)" although i'm not sure if HP has got factories in China (probably).


I know for a fact that in France agencies working in fields such as gathering data, counter spying etc.. have electronics suppliers working in france only (and they are not that many), an ex-DGSE director talked about that not so long precisely to avoid problems like these before they happen.

All this has a cost though : double-triple price but at the end of the day i think we win the game.


[edit on 22-4-2008 by themaster1]

Chinese hackers in our routers are nothing new. Anyone remember Titan Rain?
www.time.com...

And we can't forget the Chinese accusing us of spy equipment in some jumbo jets their gov bought for themselves.

Are we to be surprised when we have all this Chinese crap imported into this country?

Sentiment in China is that we owe them something because they make everything for us. It's screwed up man!

*

I bet they have lead paint on them too. I called my wife -"don't let jr play with the 2600 anymore, till we check the firmware"

Originally posted by jankopernik
Counterfeit products from China is not new, and is not the point in this thread. The point is the 'backdoor' which isn't there. Hardware is simply the conduit of the information, you still need to breach firewalls, app security, and o/s security to get to the data within the system. From my 19+ years in the IT field I would be much more concerned with a fire risk in my data center from one of these knock-off devices than the security breach potential. It SHOULD be common practice to remove all default settings from a network device and ensuring all settings are configured to your network needs prior to installation, not blindly pulling a device out of the box and pligging it into your network. This would remove any potential security vulnerabilities to some extent.

This guy is correct. I'm in the IT industry as well... The point of the government cracking down on the issue is due to a long time issue of the Chinese counterfeiting ALL types of products (not just routers and Tommy Hilfger underwear).

The reason why ebay is mentioned because that's one of the sources in which these counterfeit products were sold to unsuspecting customers around the world.

What is interesting is that the FBI states that counterfeit products are being sold to "official" Cisco Business Partners. Governments purchase off GSA contract, so the government then receives some shoddy counterfeit products as a result.

The only thing being compromised here would be Cisco's profit, and the ripping off of innocent and unsuspecting customers thinking they're getting a real Cisco router, instead they're data center catches on fire.. lol