Let's talk about the Chinese Salt Typhoon hack attack

[thewayne]

Well. This is a bit involved.

Last year it was detected that the Chinese had infiltrated at least nine major American telecommunications companies, including Verizon and AT&T. It was so bad that the FBI was telling government workers to not use secure messaging apps and phones and email and talk to people face to face.

The root cause of the problem goes back to the 1990s.

You may remember some controversy back then regarding something called the Clipper Chip. Basically the government wanted to require this chip to be installed in every piece of secure communications equipment as it provided a key escrow system. You could do secure communications between yourself and other people, but because the government held a middle key, that key could be deployed to intercept your communications without your knowledge.

There was an immediate uproar that any backdoor installed inside secure communications devices would ultimately be compromised by either nation state actors or by criminals, and security would be lost. Not to mention no guarantees that the government itself would respect our privacy.

The Clipper Chip was revealed in 1993 and was pretty much dead by '96. When the escrow algorithms were released later, they were found to be significantly flawed.

Well, that didn't stop the government from requiring key escrow, only this time it wasn't in hardware, and it was at the telcom provider level.

And it was hacked by the Chinese. And we don't know for how long.

The Department of Homeland Security created an advisory board to investigate these events, consisting of internal DHS employees and also external industry experts. Their job was to find out how the Chinese got in, how to stop them, how to harden our systems to prevent re-infiltration.

And care to guess what happened today?

The new administration fired all the external industry experts and effectively ended the investigation.

And by the way, there's plenty of evidence that the Chinese are still inside all of our major telcom providers, running amok. They accessed call log metadata from both the Harris and Republican Presidential campaigns.

So apparently not only are we likely to launch a tariff war against China, we're going to let them trash our IT infrastructure while we're doing it? Makes sense to me!

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/trump-admin-fires-homeland-security-advisory-boards-blaming-agendas/

Comments

[dewline]

I do remember the Clipper Chip mess.

And yeah, the Vulgarian's playing right into Xi's hands here. By design, I expect.

[armiphlage]

Wow, I remember discussing that on Usenet back in the day; they predicted exactly that this would happen.

[dewline]

All it took was a couple of decades.

[thewayne]

Processing power and hacking techniques are radically better now than three decades ago

[disneydream06]

Excuse me while I pick my head up off the desk.
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[warriorsavant]

We'll build in a design flaw. Someone exploited it? shocked pikachu look

[thewayne]

We'll require a design flaw, but no one else will be allowed to use it!

YOU! I'M LOOKING AT YOU! DON'T USE OUR DESIGN FLAW!

Darn it, they're using it.

[warriorsavant]

Exactly

[silveradept]

This is one of those things that even I, as someone who does not understand the details of information security, have to facepalm at. If you require insecurity in a system, it is not a secure system, and should not be treated as such. Only secure systems may be treated as secure. (That the backdoors are required, presumably to facilitate warrantless wiretapping, is an additional headache that should have made every lawyer consider their case made for them if any information obtained about their client was done through wiretap.)

So the current administrator clearly is uninterested in things like secure communications or ensuring that foreign governments aren't spying on the actions of government officials. Maybe that could be a reason to successfully impeach him and get the people they actually want in charge.