11-18-2018 Each theft has allowed Chinese companies to bypass untold years of precious time and R&D, effectively dropping them into the marathon of global competition at the 20th mile. China’s military has gotten a leg up too. Coordinated campaigns by China’s Ministry of State Security and the People’s Liberation Army have helped steal the design details of countless pieces of American military hardware, from fighter jets to ground vehicles to robots. In 2012 National Security Agency director Keith Alexander called it the “greatest transfer of wealth in history,” a phrase he has regularly repeated since.
And yet despite a great deal of restlessness in the ranks of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the United States was for years all but paralyzed in its response to Chinese hacking. China simply denied any hand in the thefts, professing to take great umbrage at the idea. American diplomats were skittish about upsetting a sensitive bilateral relationship. And American companies in turn were often inclined to play dumb and look the other way: even as they were being robbed silly they didn’t want to jeopardize their access to China’s nearly 1.4 billion consumers.
John Carlin, who served as assistant attorney general for national security during the Obama administration, recalls one meeting with executives from a West Coast company whose intellectual property was being stolen by Chinese hackers. The executives even projected that, in seven or eight years, the stolen IP would kill their business model; by that point a Chinese competitor would be able to undercut them completely with a copycat product. But the company’s general counsel still didn’t want the government to step in and take action. “We are going to be coming back to you and complaining,” the general counsel said. “But we’re not there yet.”
Finally between 2011 and 2013 the US began to reach a breaking point. Private cybersecurity firms released a string of damning investigative reports on China’s patterns of economic espionage; the US government started to talk more publicly about bringing charges against the country’s hackers. But it was far from clear how any government or company might successfully turn back the tide of Chinese incursions. President Obama pressed the issue of cyberthefts in his first meeting with President Xi in 2013, only to be met with more denials.
From what the agents could reconstruct, the hacking conspiracy had begun as early as 2009. Su’s contributions as a spy, the agents realized, were intimately tied to his work as an entrepreneur. “Su Bin was what we’d call in the traditional espionage world a spotter--someone who would tee up targets for a nation-state,” explains Luke Dembosky, one of the prosecutors overseeing the case. Through Lode-Tech Su had a deep network of industry contacts, and his team’s espionage began with mining his knowledge of the field: he would direct his hacker colleagues toward particularly interesting engineers and corporate personnel in the aerospace industry. Then the hackers likely used basic techniques—standard phishing emails--to attempt to penetrate company executives’ email accounts and from there access restricted corporate networks.
According to court records, once the hackers got inside a network—through “painstaking labor and slow groping,” as they put it--they went back to Su Bin. They would send him lists of the files they’d uncovered; he would then highlight in yellow the most valuable documents that they should exfiltrate, guiding them through what they were uncovering. (Investigators came to enjoy the secret irony in Lode-Tech’s tagline, printed in big letters on its website: “We will track the world’s aviation advanced technology.”)
It was tedious work. Some of the file directories ran to thousands of pages; in one dump of nearly 1,500 pages Su meticulously highlighted 142 files that seemed most likely to be useful to his Chinese Army contacts--files with names like C17Hangar Requirements 112399.pdf and Critical Safety Item(CSI) Report_Sep2006.pdf. In another 6,000-page directory he picked out the 22 most promising file folders--hitting on one that FBI agents later calculated contained more than 2,000 files related to the C-17.
All told, according to their own accounting, Su and his two Chinese partners stole 630,000 files related to the C-17, totaling about 65 GB of data. “We safely, smoothly accomplished the entrusted mission in one year, making important contributions to our national defense scientific research development and receiving unanimous favorable comments,” the team wrote.
The C-17 wasn’t the hacker’s only target; they filched information about other aircraft as well. Investigators believe they pillaged 220 MB of data related to the F-22 Raptor, as well as files related to the F-35, including its flight test protocols, which Su carefully translated into Chinese. The thefts would be critical to helping the Chinese understand—and copy--the world’s most advanced multirole fighter plane, which had cost $11 billion to develop.
Su was conversant with the aerospace community, and he spoke English, Chinese and the technical jargon of aviation in both languages, able to translate the complex world of industrial design schematics, plans and handbooks. “I don’t know how many Su Bins there are,” Vallese says.
Su’s hacking effort provided a staggering return on investment for the Chinese government: according to court documents the operation cost China around $1 million—an absolute pittance compared to the decades of engineering knowledge, military technology and construction details that Su and his team were able to steal from Boeing and the US Air Force. The team’s overseers ran such a tight ship that Su griped in an email about the difficulty of getting reimbursed for expenses.
According to court documents the hackers covered their tracks by pinballing stolen files through a sophisticated international server network, with machines planted in the US, Singapore and Korea. They carefully disguised documents as they stole them so as to circumvent the internal intrusion alarms at Boeing. Then they were careful to move their digital contraband through at least three foreign countries, ensuring that at least one had unfriendly relations with the United States, to throw pursuers off China’s scent. Ultimately the files would be deposited on machines near Hong Kong and Macau.
There officials would pick them up and transfer them back to China--in person, further covering all tracks between the United States and China. But the evidence the FBI had collected left no doubt that the ultimate customer was the Chinese military—and that Su Bin’s partners were members of the military themselves. While the two hackers in China have not been charged publicly, the US government knows who they are; according to court records investigators intercepted an email that one of the hackers had received with a copy of his own ID card, which included his photo, name and date of birth. Similarly, emails the FBI traced to the other hacker, included photos of both men in Chinese military uniforms.
“In the space of barely a month the United States had taken overt steps against two major Chinese economic espionage operations.” Vallese says the FBI expected it would be an ordeal to get Su Bin back from Canada. International extraditions, even from close partners and allies, are always complicated. “We weren’t under any impression this was going to be easy,” Vallese says.
As Su Bin prepared for his initial court appearances China quickly decided to send a not-so-subtle message to Canada. To make America’s northern neighbor think twice about allowing the extradition of Su Bin to the United States it appears the Ministry of State Security had Kevin and Julia Garratt invited to dinner in Dandong.
After their detention the Garratts found themselves caught in China’s Kafkaesque justice system, interrogated regularly but with nothing to confess. Their family retained James Zimmerman, an American lawyer with the firm Perkins Coie, who had spent nearly two decades working in Beijing. He began to piece together the case against the couple.
The Chinese government, he realized, was leveling charges against Kevin Garratt that were almost a mirror image of the US charges against Su Bin. ….
Su Bin declined to speak publicly, though, in court: “I lost my words now,” he said at his sentencing where a judge handed him 46 months in federal prison and ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine. With time served, he was released in October 2017.
https://www.wired.com/story/us-china-cybertheft-su-bin/
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