In the summer of 2005, Tan Dailin was a 20-year-old grad student at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering when he came to the attention of the People’s Liberation Army of China.
Tan was part of a burgeoning hacker community known as the Honkers—teens and twentysomethings in late-’90s and early-’00s China who formed groups like the Green Army and Evil Octal and launched patriotic cyberattacks against Western targets they deemed disrespectful to China. The attacks were low-sophistication—mostly website defacements and denial-of-service operations targeting entities in the US, Taiwan, and Japan—but the Honkers advanced their skills over time, and Tan documented his escapades in blog posts. After publishing about hacking targets in Japan, the PLA came calling.
The subsequent timeline of events is unclear, but Tan, who went by the hacker handles Wicked Rose and Withered Rose, then launched his own hacking group—the Network Crack Program Hacker (NCPH). The group quickly gained notoriety for winning hacking contests and developing hacking tools. They created the GinWui rootkit, one of China’s first homegrown remote-access backdoors and then, experts believe, used it and dozens of zero-day exploits they wrote in a series of “unprecedented” hacks against US companies and government entities over the spring and summer of 2006. They did this on behalf of the PLA, according to Adam Kozy, who tracked Tan and other Chinese hackers for years as a former FBI analyst who now heads the SinaCyber consulting firm, focused on China.
Tan revealed online at the time that he and his team were being paid about $250 a month for their hacking, though he didn’t say who paid or what they hacked. The pay increased to $1,000 a month after their summer hacking spree, according to a 2007 report by former threat intelligence firm VeriSign iDefense.
At some point, Tan switched teams and began contracting for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s civilian intelligence agency, as part of its notorious hacking group known as APT 41. And in 2020, when Tan was 36, the US Justice Department announced indictments against him and other alleged APT 41 members for hacking more than 100 targets, including US government systems, health care organizations, and telecoms.
Tan’s path to APT 41 isn’t unique. He’s just one of many former Honkers who began their careers as self-directed patriotic hackers before being absorbed by the state into its massive spying apparatus.
Not a lot has been written about the Honkers and their critical role in China’s APT operations, outside of congressional testimony Kozy gave in 2022. But a new report, published this month by Eugenio Benincasa, senior cyberdefense researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich university in Switzerland, expands on Kozy’s work to track the Honkers’ early days and how this group of skilled youths became some of China’s most prolific cyberspies.
“This is not just about [Honkers] creating a hacker culture that was implicitly aligned with national security goals,” Benincasa says, “but also the personal relations they created [that] we still see reflected in the APTs today.”
Early Days
The Honker community largely began when China joined the internet in 1994, and a network connecting universities and research centers across the country for knowledge-sharing put Chinese students online before the rest of the country. Like US hackers, the Honkers were self-taught tech enthusiasts who flocked to electronic bulletin boards (dial-up forums) to share programming and computer hacking tips. They soon formed groups like Xfocus, China Eagle Union, and The Honker Union of China and came to be known as Red Hackers or Honkers, a name derived from the Mandarin word “hong,” for red, and “heike,” for dark visitor—the Chinese term for hacker.
The open source software easyjson is used by the US government and American companies. But its ties to Russia’s VK, whose CEO has been sanctioned, have researchers sounding the alarm.
Security researchers warn that a popular open source tool maintained by Russian developers could pose significant risks to US national security.
Key Points:
The open source tool easyjson is linked to VK Group, a company run by a sanctioned Russian executive.
easyjson is widely used in the US across various critical sectors including defense, finance, and healthcare.
Concerns are heightened due to the potential for data theft and cyberattacks stemming from this software.
*Recent findings from cybersecurity researchers at Hunted Labs indicate that easyjson, a code serialization tool for the Go programming language, is at the center of a national security alert. This tool, which has been integrated into multiple sectors such as the US Department of Defense, is maintained by a group of Russian developers linked to VK Group, led by Vladimir Kiriyenko. While the complete codebase appears secure, the geopolitical context surrounding its management raises substantial concerns about the potential risks involved.
The significance of easyjson cannot be overstated, as it serves as a foundational element within the cloud-native ecosystem, critical for operations across various platforms. With connections to a sanctioned CEO and the broader backdrop of Russian state-backed cyberattacks, the fear is that easyjson could be manipulated to conduct espionage or potentially compromise critical infrastructures. Such capabilities underscore the pressing need for independent evaluations and potential reevaluations of software supply chains, particularly when foreign entities are involved.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., today, unsealed two separate indictments that allege Chinese nationals Yin Kecheng, 38, (尹 可成) a/k/a “YKC” (“YIN”) and Zhou Shuai, 45, (周帅) a/k/a “Coldface” (“ZHOU”) violated various federal statutes by participating in years-long, sophisticated computer hacking conspiracies that successfully targeted a wide variety of U.S.-based victims
This blog post covers the full details of EntrySign, the AMD Zen microcode signature validation vulnerability recently discovered by the Google Security team.
Four alleged European hackers have been arrested in Phuket for deploying ransomware on the networks of 17 Swiss firms. The suspects are accused of causing significant damage and stealing $16 million in Bitcoins from 1,000 global victims.
Security researchers have discovered an arbitrary account takeover flaw in Subaru's Starlink service that could let attackers track, control, and hijack vehicles in the United States, Canada, and Japan using just a license plate.
#Account #Canada #Car #Computer #Hacking #InfoSec #Japan #Security #Starlink #Subaru #Takeover #USA
Cyber criminals claim to have successfully attacked Medion, a distributor of electronic products.
In a first, Russia's APT28 hacking group appears to have remotely breached the Wi-Fi of an espionage target by hijacking a laptop in another building across the street.
Etudiant en informatique, fasciné par l’univers des cybercriminels, il est accusé d’avoir lancé des attaques par bourrage d’identifiants à l’automne 2023. Récit d'audience.
Sophos went so far as to plant surveillance “implants” on its own devices to catch the hackers at work—and in doing so, revealed a glimpse into China's R&D pipeline of intrusion techniques.
Reuters News has restored to its website an investigation into mercenary hacking after a New Delhi court lifted a takedown order it issued last year.
The article, originally published on Nov. 16, 2023, and titled “How an Indian startup hacked the world,” detailed the origins and operations of a New Delhi-based cybersecurity firm called Appin. Reuters found that Appin grew from an educational startup to a hack-for-hire powerhouse that stole secrets from executives, politicians and wealthy elites around the globe.
The hacking group's X account shared videos comparing Xi Jinping to an emperor and others commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
APT42, which is believed to work for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted about a dozen people associated with both Trump’s and Biden’s campaigns this spring, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group.
The Sykhiv residential area in Lviv was left without hot water and heating as a result of a hacker attack on Lvivteploenergo. This is reported on the company's website.
"The hacker attack disrupted the heat supply management system. Work is underway to restore heating and hot water supply in the Sykhiv residential area. The estimated time of restoration is 21:00," the statement said.
Researchers have discovered several vulnerabilities in popular WordPress plugins that allow attackers to create rogue admin accounts.
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Sources suspect China is behind the targeted exploitation of two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco’s security appliances.
Researchers uncover a fresh wave of the Raspberry Robin campaign spreading malware through malicious Windows Script Files (WSFs) since March 2024.
#attacks #breach #computer #cyber #data #hack #hacker #hacking #how #information #malware #network #news #ransomware #security #software #the #to #today #updates #vulnerability
On the first day of Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024, contestants demoed Windows 11, Tesla, and Ubuntu Linux zero-day vulnerabilities and exploit chains to win $732,500 and a Tesla Model 3 car.
