NSA behind major cyberattack on Chinese university

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The Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shaanxi, China, announced that foreign hackers were caught sending phishing emails with Trojan horse programs (malware that misleads users) to teachers and students at the university, in an attempt to steal their data and personal information. 

The day after, a police statement released by the Beilin Public Security Bureau in Xi’an stated that the attack's intent was to lure teachers and students into clicking links of phishing emails, tricking them with themes involving scientific evaluation, thesis defense, and information on foreign travel, in order to obtain their email login credentials.

China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, and internet security company 360,  formed a joint technical team to conduct a comprehensive technical analysis of the case and investigate the attack.

After collecting multiple trojan samples from internet terminals of Northwestern Polytechnical University, with the support of European and South Asian partners, the team initially diagnosed that the cyberattack was conducted by the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) (Code S32) under the Data Reconnaissance Bureau (Code S3) of the Information Department (Code S) of the US’ NSA (National Security Agency). 

TAO, founded in 1998, is the largest and most significant part of the intelligence division of the NSA and its main responsibility is to secretly access the insider information of its competitors through the internet, invade target countries' classified information infrastructure to steal account codes, break computer security systems, monitor network traffic, invade privacy and steal sensitive data such as access to phone calls, emails, network communications, and messages. 

The cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit is composed of more than 1,000 active military personnel, network hackers, intelligence analysts, academics, hardware and software designers, and electronics engineers. The entire organizational structure contains one "center" and four "divisions."

The Global Times learned that the attack was code-named "shotXXXX" by the NSA. The head of TAO, Rob Joyce, is directly involved in the command and action alongside the remote operations center (responsible for operational weapons platforms and tools for controlling target systems) and an infrastructure task division (mainly responsible for developing and building network infrastructure and security monitoring platform for attacks). 

The four other divisions also contributing to the execution included the advanced/access network technology division, the data network technology division, the telecommunications network technology division (technical support), and the requirements and location division (for strategy and intelligence assessment).  

According to the investigation, TAO has administered tens of thousands of malicious attacks against targets in China recently, controlling large numbers of network devices such as web servers, internet terminals, network switches, telephone switches, routers, and firewalls to steal a high value of more than 140 GB of data.

It was discovered that TAO had acquired the management authority of a large number of communication network equipment in China, but what facilitated the invasions was the cooperation of several large and well-known internet enterprises in the US before the attack began. Former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, infamously known for uncovering US intelligence secrets in 2013, disclosed data on cyber activities in China and Hong Kong when American magazine Foreign Policy simultaneously confirmed TAO’s existence within the agency that has been successfully violating Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years.

TAO used 41 types of digital weapons 54 jumpers and proxy servers to steal the core technology data from the university including key network equipment configuration, network management data, and core operational data which the technical team discovered in more than 1,100 attack affiliations inside the university and more than 90 operating instruction sequences. The servers were distributed in 17 countries such as Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Poland and Ukraine. 

According to the source at the university, 13 people from the US were directly involved in the attack, and more than 60 contracts and 170 electronic documents that the NSA signed with US telecom operators were found through a cover company to build an environment for cyberattacks. 

The NSA has been notoriously executing secret hacking activities against China’s governments, universities, medical institutions, scientific research institutions, infrastructure and maintenance units related to the national economy and people’s livelihood. China's National People's Congress passed a law, the Personal Information Protection, which protects online user privacy in cyberspace. As the second draft of the law was lodged last April, upon passing, it will be implemented starting November 1. 

On June 29, China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and internet security company 360 also disclosed a new vulnerability attack weapon platform utilized by the NSA, which experts believe is the main equipment of TAO, that bullseyes the world with a focus on China and Russia - raising wide suspicions that the country might be preparing for a bigger cyberwar. 

Earlier this year, US President Joe Biden was presented with a variety of cyberattack possibilities to deploy against Russia, according to sources familiar with the situation, but no final decision has been taken.