Hacked by suspected Chinese cyber spies five times from 2014 to 2017, security s...
LONDON - Hacked by suspected Chinese cyber spies five times from 2014 to 2017, security staff at Swedish telecoms equipment giant Ericsson had taken to naming their response efforts after different types of wine.
The hacking campaign, known as “Cloud Hopper,” was the subject of a U.S. indictment in December that accused two Chinese nationals of identity theft and fraud. Prosecutors described an elaborate operation that victimized multiple Western companies but stopped short of naming them. A Reuters report at the time identified two: Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM.
“This was the theft of industrial or commercial secrets for the purpose of advancing an economy,” said former Australian National Cyber Security Adviser Alastair MacGibbon. “The lifeblood of a company.” The campaign also highlights the security vulnerabilities inherent in cloud computing, an increasingly popular practice in which companies contract with outside vendors for remote computer services and data storage.
A spokesman for DXC, the services arm spun off by HPE in 2017, said the company put “robust security measures in place” to protect itself and customers. “Since the inception of DXC Technology, neither the company nor any DXC customer whose environment is under our control have experienced a material impact caused by APT10 or any other threat actor,” the spokesman said.
Hewlett Packard security staff fought back, tracking the intruders, shoring up defenses and executing a carefully planned expulsion to simultaneously knock out all of the hackers’ known footholds. But the attackers returned, beginning a cycle that continued for at least five years. Projects Kronos and Echo related to former Swiss biotech firm Syngenta, which was taken over by state-owned Chinese chemicals conglomerate ChemChina in 2017 – during the same period as the HPE investigation into Chinese attacks on its network.
According to Western officials, the attackers were multiple Chinese government-backed hacking groups. The most feared was known as APT10 and directed by the Ministry of State Security, U.S. prosecutors say. National security experts say the Chinese intelligence service is comparable to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, capable of pursuing both electronic and human spying operations.
After the attackers “hopped” from a service provider’s network into a client system, their behavior varied, which suggests the attacks were conducted by multiple teams with different skill levels and tasks, say those aware of the operation. Some intruders resembled “drunken burglars,” said one source, getting lost in the labyrinth of corporate systems and appearing to grab files at random.
In 2015, investigators found that at least four HP machines dedicated to Sabre were tunneling large amounts of data to an external server. The Sabre breach was long-running and intractable, said two former HPE employees. Huntington Ingalls is “confident that there was no breach of any HII data” via DXC or HPE, a spokeswoman said.
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