Routers and refrigerators used by China's cyber intelligence for dangerous attacks

In the West, China's cyber intelligence uses private routers, gadgets connected to the network, and smart refrigerators to carry out hacker attacks on institutions and critical infrastructure and to steal secret information, the Financial Times reported, citing the intelligence services of many countries.

Hackers employed by the Chinese government routinely use “vast networks” of Internet-connected home appliances and gadgets to carry out attacks on “national infrastructure and democratic institutions,” explains the British daily, citing the assessment of the intelligence agencies of Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, as well as the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, within which the services of the US, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand cooperate.

On Thursday, the UK National Cybersecurity Center reported that Chinese cyberintelligence uses tens of thousands of ordinary home devices connected to the Internet to create networks of bots capable of carrying out attacks and stealing information. This practice is not new, but China uses it “strategically and on a large scale,” said the British center.

Hacking into routers or refrigerators in private homes or companies is not a problem, because very often their software is not updated. Networked equipment allows not only to carry out sophisticated attacks, but also to effectively mask them, explained a representative of a European intelligence agency in an interview with the FT.

In March, the Five Eyes alliance warned that Russia was also trying to use private equipment for cyberattacks, but China was doing it on a much larger scale.

The three most important Chinese hacking units, known as Volt Typhoon, Flax Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, and associated with the army and the Ministry of State Security, routinely use bot network attacks in their operations, Western services have found.

In the opinion of US intelligence, the main goal of such attacks is to damage civilian and military systems, for example to make it more difficult for the US to respond to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan or another form of attack on the island.

On Thursday, the FT obtained a document prepared by White House Director of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios, who accused China of stealing American intellectual property related to artificial intelligence using the so-called distillation (distillation). It is the process of training smaller AI models based on the achievements of larger models, in order to build a new product at a lower cost.

As the daily emphasized, the American AI sector is concerned about the risk posed by foreign “distilled models” that do not have appropriate safeguards that prevent, for example, the creation of biological weapons or the conduct of malicious cyberattacks. (PAP)

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