N.S.A. Hacked Chinese Servers That U.S. Saw as Spy Risk
By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH
As the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from
Huawei Technologies, classified documents show that the National
Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s
networks.
N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat
WASHINGTON
— American officials have long considered Huawei, the Chinese
telecommunications giant, a security threat, blocking it from business
deals in the United States for fear that the company would create “back
doors” in its equipment that could allow the Chinese military or
Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.
But even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks.
The agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s
industrial heart, according to N.S.A. documents provided by the former
contractor Edward J. Snowden. It obtained information about the workings
of the giant routers and complex digital switches that Huawei boasts
connect a third of the world’s population, and monitored communications
of the company’s top executives.
One
of the goals of the operation, code-named “Shotgiant,” was to find any
links between Huawei and the People’s Liberation Army, one 2010 document
made clear. But the plans went further: to exploit Huawei’s technology
so that when the company sold equipment to other countries — including
both allies and nations that avoid buying American products — the N.S.A.
could roam through their computer and telephone networks to conduct
surveillance and, if ordered by the president, offensive
cyberoperations.
“Many
of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” the N.S.A.
document said. “We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these
products,” it added, to “gain access to networks of interest” around the
world.
The documents were disclosed by The New York Times and Der Spiegel,
and are also part of a book by Der Spiegel, “The N.S.A. Complex.” The
documents, as well as interviews with intelligence officials, offer new
insights into the United States’ escalating digital cold war with
Beijing. While President Obama and China’s president, Xi Jinping, have
begun talks about limiting the cyber conflict, it appears to be
intensifying.
The
N.S.A., for example, is tracking more than 20 Chinese hacking groups —
more than half of them Chinese Army and Navy units — as they break into
the networks of the United States government, companies including
Google, and drone and nuclear-weapon part makers, according to a
half-dozen current and former American officials.
If
anything, they said, the pace has increased since the revelation last
year that some of the most aggressive Chinese hacking originated at a
People’s Liberation Army facility, Unit 61398, in Shanghai.
The
Obama administration distinguishes between the hacking and corporate
theft that the Chinese conduct against American companies to buttress
their own state-run businesses, and the intelligence operations that the
United States conducts against Chinese and other targets.
American
officials have repeatedly said that the N.S.A. breaks into foreign
networks only for legitimate national security purposes.
A
White House spokeswoman, Caitlin M. Hayden, said: “We do not give
intelligence we collect to U.S. companies to enhance their international
competitiveness or increase their bottom line. Many countries cannot
say the same.”
But
that does not mean the American government does not conduct its own
form of corporate espionage with a different set of goals. Those
concerning Huawei were described in the 2010 document.
“If
we can determine the company’s plans and intentions,” an analyst wrote,
“we hope that this will lead us back to the plans and intentions of the
PRC,” referring to the People’s Republic of China. The N.S.A. saw an
additional opportunity: As Huawei invested in new technology and laid
undersea cables to connect its $40 billion-a-year networking empire, the
agency was interested in tunneling into key Chinese customers,
including “high priority targets — Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya,
Cuba.”
Document
Slides Describe Mission Involving Huawei
Powerpoint slides from 2010 lay out the National
Security Agency’s goals in an effort to break into networks of Huawei,
the telecommunications giant.
The
documents offer no answer to a central question: Is Huawei an
independent company, as its leaders contend, or a front for the People’s
Liberation Army, as American officials suggest but have never publicly
proved?
Two
years after Shotgiant became a major program, the House Intelligence
Committee delivered an unclassified report on Huawei and another Chinese
company, ZTE, that cited no evidence confirming the suspicions about
Chinese government ties. Still, the October 2012 report concluded that
the companies must be blocked from “acquisitions, takeover or mergers”
in the United States, and “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state
influence.”
Huawei,
which has all but given up its hopes of entering the American market,
complains that it is the victim of protectionism, swathed in trumped-up
national security concerns. Company officials insist that it has no
connection to the People’s Liberation Army.
William
Plummer, a senior Huawei executive in the United States, said the
company had no idea it was an N.S.A. target, adding that in his personal
opinion, “The irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what
they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”
“If
such espionage has been truly conducted,” Mr. Plummer added, “then it
is known that the company is independent and has no unusual ties to any
government, and that knowledge should be relayed publicly to put an end
to an era of mis- and disinformation.”
Blocked at Every Turn
Washington’s
concerns about Huawei date back nearly a decade, since the RAND
Corporation, the research organization, evaluated the potential threat
of China for the American military. RAND concluded that “private Chinese
companies such as Huawei” were part of a new “digital triangle” of
companies, institutes and government agencies that worked together
secretly.
Huawei
is a global giant: it manufactures equipment that makes up the backbone
of the Internet, lays submarine cables from Asia to Africa and has
become the world’s third largest smartphone maker after Samsung and
Apple.
The
man behind its strategy is Ren Zhengfei, the company’s elusive founder,
who was a P.L.A. engineer in the 1970s. To the Chinese, he is something
akin to Steve Jobs — an entrepreneur who started a digital empire with
little more than $3,000 in the mid-1980s, and took on both state-owned
companies and foreign competitors. But to American officials, he is a
link to the People’s Liberation Army.
Acting to Block a Chinese Telecom Giant
Over the past seven years, the United States government has
taken steps to block the Chinese telecommunications and internet giant
Huawei from gaining a foothold here, fearing that the company could act
on behalf of the Chinese military to gain access to government and
corporate secrets. The company was founded in 1987 and by the mid-90s
had begun making inroads into the U.S. telecom equipment market.
U.S. RELATIONS WITH HUAWEI
2003–4 Cisco sues Huawei for stealing source code; the suit is settled with neither side revealing terms.
2005 The Air
Force hires the RAND corporation to examine threats from Chinese
networking firms; it concludes there is a “digital triangle” of Chinese
military, state research groups, and companies like Huawei.
2007 The National Security Administration begins its “Shotgiant” effort to pierce Huawei’s networks and exploit its systems.
2008 The U.S. blocks Huawei from buying 3Com on national security grounds.
2010 The U.S. persuades Australia to kill a plan to let Huawei build a national broadband network.
2011 In an open letter to the U.S., Huawei denies that it is a front for the Chinese government, and invites investigation.
2012 The House
Intelligence Committee produces a long report urging the U.S. to “block
acquisitions, takeovers or mergers” with Huawei, and to exclude its
equipment from U.S. systems.
2013 The U.S.
approves purchase of Sprint Nextel by Softbank Corporation, but under
conditions that probably exclude Huawei equipment.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., on a trip
to Seoul, urges South Korea to kill a contract for Huawei to build an
advanced telecom network for Seoul.
They
have blocked his company at every turn: pressing Sprint to kill a $3
billion deal to buy Huawei’s fourth generation, or 4G, network
technology; scuttling a planned purchase of 3Com for fear that Huawei
would alter computer code sold to the United States military; and
pushing allies, like Australia, to back off from major projects.
As
long ago as 2007, the N.S.A. began a covert program against Huawei, the
documents show. By 2010, the agency’s Tailored Access Operations unit —
which breaks into hard-to-access networks — found a way into Huawei’s
headquarters. The agency collected Mr. Ren’s communications, one
document noted, though analysts feared they might be missing many of
them.
N.S.A.
analysts made clear that they were looking for more than just “signals
intelligence” about the company and its connections to Chinese leaders;
they wanted to learn how to pierce its systems so that when adversaries
and allies bought Huawei equipment, the United States would be plugged
into those networks. (The Times withheld technical details of the
operation at the request of the Obama administration, which cited
national security concerns.)
The
N.S.A.’s operations against China do not stop at Huawei. Last year, the
agency cracked two of China’s biggest cellphone networks, allowing it
to track strategically important Chinese military units, according to an
April 2013 document leaked by Mr. Snowden. Other major targets, the
document said, are the locations where the Chinese leadership works. The
country’s leaders, like everyone else, are constantly upgrading to
better, faster Wi-Fi — and the N.S.A. is constantly finding new ways in.
Hack Attacks Accelerate
Chinese
state attacks have only accelerated in recent years, according to the
current and former intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity about classified information.
A
dozen P.L.A. military units — aside from Unit 61398 — do their hacking
from eavesdropping posts around China, and though their targets were
initially government agencies and foreign ministries around the world,
they have since expanded into the private sector. For example, officials
point to the First Bureau of the army’s Third Department, which the
N.S.A. began tracking in 2004 after it hacked into the Pentagon’s
networks. The unit’s targets have grown to include telecom and
technology companies that specialize in networking and encryption
equipment — including some Huawei competitors.
For
some of its most audacious attacks, China relies on hackers at
state-funded universities and privately owned Chinese technology
companies, apparently as much for their skills as for the plausible
deniability it offers the state if it gets caught. The N.S.A. is
tracking more than half a dozen such groups suspected of operating at
the behest of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, China’s civilian
spy agency, the officials said.
Their
targets, they noted, closely align with China’s stated economic and
strategic directives. As China strove to develop drones and
next-generation ballistic and submarine-launched missiles in recent
years, the N.S.A. and its partners watched as one group of privately
employed engineers based in Guangzhou in southern China pilfered the
blueprints to missile, satellite, space, and nuclear propulsion
technology from businesses in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia
and Africa.
And
as China strove to make its own inroads on the web, officials said
another group of private hackers infiltrated Google, Adobe and dozens of
other global technology companies in 2010. Lately, the officials said,
that group and its counterparts are also going after security firms,
banks, chemical companies, automakers and even nongovernment
organizations.
“China
does more in terms of cyberespionage than all other countries put
together,” said James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“The question is no longer which industries China is hacking into,” he added. “It’s which industries they aren’t hacking into.”
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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