Tag: Counter-Intelligence

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American Telecommunication Companies’ Cybersecurity Deficiencies Increasingly Apparent

Five Eyes countries have regularly and routinely sought, and gained, access to foreign telecommunications infrastructures to carry out their operations. The same is true of other well resourced countries, including China.

Salt Typhoon’s penetration of American telecommunications and email platforms is slowly coming into relief. The New York Times has an article that summarizes what is being publicly disclosed at this point in time:

  • The full list of phone numbers that the Department of Justice had under surveillance in lawful interception systems has been exposed, with the effect of likely undermining American counter-intelligence operations aimed at Chinese operatives
  • Phone calls, unencrypted SMS messages, and email providers have been compromised
  • The FBI has heightened concerns that informants may have been exposed
  • Apple’s services, as well as end to end encrypted systems, were not penetrated

American telecommunications networks were penetrated, in part, due to companies relying on decades old systems and equipment that do not meet modern security requirements. Fixing these deficiencies may require rip-and-replacing some old parts of the network with the effect of creating “painful network outages for consumers.” Some of the targeting of American telecommunications networks is driven by an understanding that American national security defenders have some restrictions on how they can operate on American-based systems.

The weaknesses of telecommunications networks and their associated systems are generally well known. And mobile systems are particularly vulnerable to exploitation as a result of archaic standards and an unwillingness by some carriers to activate the security-centric aspects of 4G and 5G standards.

Some of the Five Eyes, led by Canada, have been developing and deploying defensive sensor networks that are meant to shore up some defences of government and select non-government organizations.1 But these edge, network, and cloud based sensors can only do so much: telecommunications providers, themselves, need to prioritize ensuring their core networks are protected against the classes of adversaries trying to penetrate them.2

At the same time, it is worth recognizing that end to end communications continued to be protected even in the face of Salt Typhoon’s actions. This speaks the urgent need to ensure that these forms of communications security continue to be available to all users. We often read that law enforcement needs select access to such communications and that they can be trusted to not abuse such exceptional access.

Setting aside the vast range of legal, normative, or geopolitical implications of weakening end to end encryption, cyber operations like the one perpetrated by Salt Typhoon speak to governments’ collective inabilities to protect their lawful access systems. There’s no reason to believe they’d be any more able to protect exceptional access measures that weakened, or otherwise gained access to, select content of end to end encrypted communications.

  1. I have discussed these sensors elsewhere, including in “Unpacking NSICOP’s Special Report on the Government of Canada’s Framework and Activities to Defend its Systems and Networks from Cyber Attack”. Historical information about these sensors, which were previously referred to under the covernames of CASCADE, EONBLUE, and PHOTONICPRISM, is available at the SIGINT summaries. ↩︎
  2. We are seeing some governments introducing, and sometimes passing, laws that would foster more robust security requirements. In Canada, Bill C-26 is generally meant to do this though the legislation as introduced raised some serious concerns. ↩︎
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Operation Fox Hunt

(Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com)

ProPublica’s Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg have an outstanding piece on the Chinese government’s efforts to compel individuals to return to China to face often trumped up charges. Efforts include secretly sending Chinese officials into the United States to surveil, harass, intimidate, and stalk residents of the United States, and also imprisoning or otherwise threatening residents’ family member who have remained in China.

Many of the details in the article are the result of court records, interviews, and assessments of Chinese media. It remains to be seen whether Chinese agents’ abilities to conduct ‘fox hunts’ will be impeded now that the US government is more aware of these operations. Given the attention and suspicion now cast towards citizens of China, however, there is also a risk that FBI agents may become overzealous in their investigations to the detriment of law-abiding Chinese-Americans or visitors from China.

In an ideal world there would be equivalent analyses or publications on the extent to which these operations are also undertaken in Canada. To date, however, there is no equivalent to ProPublica’s piece in the Canadian media landscape and given the Canadian media’s contraction we can’t realistically expect anything, anytime soon. However, even a short piece which assessed whether individuals from China who’ve run operations in the United States, and who are now barred from entering the US or would face charges upon crossing the US border, are similarly barred or under an extradition order in Canada would be a positive addition to what we know of how the Canadian government is responding to these kinds of Chinese operations.

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A Deep Dive Into Russian Surveillance In The Silicon Valley Area

Via Foreign Policy:

This focus on signals and technical intelligence persisted until much more recently, multiple former U.S. intelligence officials told me. “It was almost like everyone they had there was a technical guy, as opposed to a human-intelligence guy,” one former official recalled. “The way they protected those people — they were rarely out in the community. It was work, home, work, home. When they’d go out and about, to play hockey or to drink, they’d be in a group. It was hard to penetrate.” The same official also noted that San Francisco was integral to the discovery by U.S. intelligence of a new class of Russian “technical-type” intelligence officer, working for the rough Russian equivalent of the National Security Agency, before this organization was eventually folded by Putin back into the FSB. This group, which was not based at the consulate itself, was identified via its members’ travel patterns — they would visit the Bay Area frequently — and the types of individuals, all in high-tech development, with whom they sought contact. According to this former U.S. official, these Russian intelligence officers were particularly interested in discussing cryptology and the Next Generation Internet program.

But it was the consulate’s location — perched high atop that hill in Pacific Heights, with a direct line of sight out to the ocean — that likely determined the concentration of signals activity. Certain types of highly encrypted communications cannot be transmitted over long distances, and multiple sources told me that U.S. officials believed that Russian intelligence potentially took advantage of the consulate’s location to communicate with submarines, trawlers, or listening posts located in international waters off the Northern California coast. (Russian intelligence officers may also have been remotely transmitting data to spy stations offshore, multiple former intelligence officials told me, explaining the odd behaviors on Stinson Beach.) It is also “very possible,” said one former intelligence official, that the Russians were using the San Francisco consulate to monitor the movements, and perhaps communications, of the dozen or so U.S. nuclear-armed submarines that routinely patrol the Pacific from their base in Washington state.

All in all, said this same official, it was “very likely” that the consulate functioned for Russia as a classified communications hub for the entire western United States — and, perhaps, the entire western part of the hemisphere.

There is a lot to this very long form piece, including descriptions of Russian intelligence operations and communications patterns, how lawful Russian overflights of American territory might be used for a variety of intelligence purposes, and the Trump administration’s likely cluelessness about why closing the Russian consulate in San Francisco was so significant. But most interestingly, for me, was how the consulate likely functioned as an outpost for Russian signals intelligence operations, both due to the depth of analysis in the article but also for what it tells us about how Western-allied consulates and diplomatic facilities are likely used.1 In effect, the concerns raised by former FBI and other American counter-intelligence officers speaks to how America and her allies may conduct their own forms of surveillance.

  1. In a provincial sense, the concerns and opinions espoused by American counter-intelligence officers also raises questions as to the role of Canada’s significant number of diplomatic facilities scattered throughout China and other regions where the United States is more challenged in building out State Department facilities. ↩