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Andy Greenberg
Security
Oct 31, 2024 8:45 AM


INSIDE A FIREWALL VENDOR'S 5-YEAR WAR WITH THE CHINESE HACKERS HIJACKING ITS
DEVICES

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.
Photo Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

Save this storySave
Save this storySave

For years, it's been an inconvenient truth within the cybersecurity industry
that the network security devices sold to protect customers from spies and
cybercriminals are, themselves, often the machines those intruders hack to gain
access to their targets. Again and again, vulnerabilities in “perimeter” devices
like firewalls and VPN appliances have become footholds for sophisticated
hackers trying to break into the very systems those appliances were designed to
safeguard.

Now one cybersecurity vendor is revealing how intensely—and for how long—it has
battled with one group of hackers that have sought to exploit its products to
their own advantage. For more than five years, the UK cybersecurity firm Sophos
engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with one loosely connected team of adversaries
who targeted its firewalls. The company went so far as to track down and monitor
the specific devices on which the hackers were testing their intrusion
techniques, surveil the hackers at work, and ultimately trace that focused,
years-long exploitation effort to a single network of vulnerability researchers
in Chengdu, China.


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On Thursday, Sophos chronicled that half-decade-long war with those Chinese
hackers in a report that details its escalating tit-for-tat. The company went as
far as discreetly installing its own “implants” on the Chinese hackers' Sophos
devices to monitor and preempt their attempts at exploiting its firewalls.
Sophos researchers even eventually obtained from the hackers' test machines a
specimen of “bootkit” malware designed to hide undetectably in the firewalls'
low-level code used to boot up the devices, a trick that has never been seen in
the wild.

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In the process, Sophos analysts identified a series of hacking campaigns that
had started with indiscriminate mass exploitation of its products but eventually
became more stealthy and targeted, hitting nuclear energy suppliers and
regulators, military targets including a military hospital, telecoms, government
and intelligence agencies, and the airport of one national capital. While most
of the targets—which Sophos declined to identify in greater detail—were in South
and Southeast Asia, a smaller number were in Europe, the Middle East, and the
United States.

Sophos' report ties those multiple hacking campaigns—with varying levels of
confidence—to Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups including those known as
APT41, APT31, and Volt Typhoon, the latter of which is a particularly aggressive
team that has sought the ability to disrupt critical infrastructure in the US,
including power grids. But the common thread throughout those efforts to hack
Sophos' devices, the company says, is not one of those previously identified
hackers groups but instead a broader network of researchers that appears to have
developed hacking techniques and supplied them to the Chinese government.
Sophos' analysts tie that exploit development to an academic institute and a
contractor, both around Chengdu: Sichuan Silence Information Technology—a firm
previously tied by Meta to Chinese state-run disinformation efforts—and the
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.



Sophos says it’s telling that story now not just to share a glimpse of China's
pipeline of hacking research and development, but also to break the
cybersecurity industry's awkward silence around the larger issue of
vulnerabilities in security appliances serving as entry points for hackers. In
just the past year, for instance, flaws in security products from other vendors
including Ivanti, Fortinet, Cisco, and Palo Alto have all been exploited in mass
hacking or targeted intrusion campaigns. “This is becoming a bit of an open
secret. People understand this is happening, but unfortunately everyone is zip,”
says Sophos chief information security officer Ross McKerchar, miming pulling a
zipper across his lips. “We're taking a different approach, trying to be very
transparent, to address this head-on and meet our adversary on the battlefield.”


FROM ONE HACKED DISPLAY TO WAVES OF MASS INTRUSION

As Sophos tells it, the company's long-running battle with the Chinese hackers
began in 2018 with a breach of Sophos itself. The company discovered a malware
infection on a computer running a display screen in the Ahmedabad office of its
India-based subsidiary Cyberoam. The malware had gotten Sophos' attention due to
its noisy scanning of the network. But when the company's analysts looked more
closely, they found that the hackers behind it had already compromised other
machines on the Cyberoam network with a more sophisticated rootkit they
identified as CloudSnooper. In retrospect, the company believes that initial
intrusion was designed to gain intelligence about Sophos products that would
enable follow-on attacks on its customers.

Then in the spring of 2020, Sophos began to learn about a broad campaign of
indiscriminate infections of tens of thousands of firewalls around the world in
an apparent attempt to install a trojan called Asnarök and create what it calls
“operational relay boxes” or ORBs—essentially a botnet of compromised machines
the hackers could use as launching points for other operations. The campaign was
surprisingly well resourced, exploiting multiple zero-day vulnerabilities the
hackers appeared to have discovered in Sophos appliances. Only a bug in the
malware's cleanup attempts on a small fraction of the affected machines allowed
Sophos to analyze the intrusions and begin to study the hackers targeting its
products.

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As Sophos pushed out patches to its firewalls, its team responsible for threat
intelligence and incident response, which it calls X-Ops, also began an effort
to track its adversary: Sophos included in its “hotfix" for the hackers'
intrusions additional code that would collect more data from customers' devices.
That new data collection revealed that a single Sophos device registered in
February of 2020 in Chengdu showed signs of early alterations similar to the
Asnarök malware. “We started to find tiny little indicators of the attack that
predated any other activity,” McKerchar says.



Using registration data and records of downloads of code Sophos made available
to its customers, the X-Ops team eventually identified a handful of machines it
believed were being used as guinea pig devices for Chinese hackers as they
sought to find vulnerabilities and test their intrusion techniques prior to
deployment. Some of them seemed to have been obtained by a Chengdu-based company
called Sichuan Silence Information Technology. Others were tied to an individual
who used the handle TStark, whom X-Ops analysts then found had held a position
at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, also in
Chengdu.

X-Ops analysts could even observe individuals using computers and IP addresses
tied to the test devices reading Sophos' online materials that detailed the
firewalls' architecture. “We could see them researching us,” McKerchar says.

In late April of 2020, Dutch police worked with Sophos to seize a
Netherlands-based server that Sophos had identified as being used in the Asnarök
infection wave. In June of that year, however, the hackers launched another
round of their mass intrusions, and Sophos found they had significantly reduced
the complexity and “noise” of their malware in an attempt to evade detection.
Yet through the increased data collection from its devices and the intelligence
it had assembled on the Chengdu exploit development group, Sophos was able to
spot the malware and push out patches for the vulnerabilities the hackers had
used within a week, and even identify a “patient zero” machine where the new
malware had first been tested two months earlier.

The next month, X-Ops took its most aggressive step yet in countering the effort
to exploit its devices, deploying its own spy implants to the Sophos devices in
Chengdu they were testing on—essentially hacking the hackers, albeit only
through code added to a few installations of its own products the hackers had
obtained. Sophos says that preemptive surveillance allowed the company to obtain
key portions of the hackers' code and head off a third wave of their intrusions,
catching it after only two customers had been compromised and pushing out a
patch designed to block the attacks, while obfuscating that fix to avoid tipping
off the hackers to Sophos' full knowledge of their techniques.

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“In the first wave, we were on the back foot. In the second wave, it was an even
match,” says McKerchar. “The third attack, we preempted.”


A NEW PHASE OF THE GAME

Starting in 2021, Sophos says it began to see far more targeted attacks from
Chinese hacker groups exploiting its products, many of which it was able to
uncover due to its efforts to surveil the research of the Chengdu-based exploit
development network. Over the next two years, the hackers continued hijack
vulnerabilities in Sophos appliances in a wide variety of targeted attacks
hitting dozens of targets in Asia and the West.

In September of 2022, for instance, Sophos found a campaign exploiting a
vulnerability in its products that had breached military and intelligence
agencies in a Southeast Asian country, as well as other targets including water
utilities and electric generation facilities in the same region. Later, Sophos
says, a different Chinese state-sponsored group appears to have exploited a
bypass for its patch for that vulnerability to target government agencies
outside of Asia, in one instance hacking an embassy shortly before it was set to
host officials from China's ruling Communist Party. It also found intrusions at
another country's nuclear energy regulatory agency, then a military facility in
the same country and the airport of the country's capital city, as well as other
hacking incidents that targeted Tibetan exiles.

“We just opened the door on a huge amount of high-end targeted activity, a
Pandora's Box of threat intelligence," McKerchar says.

As the hackers' tooling continued to evolve in response to Sophos' attempts to
head them off, the company's X-Ops researchers at one point pulled from a test
device they were surveilling a unique new specimen of malware: The hackers had
built a “bootkit,” an early attempt at malware designed to infect a Sophos
firewall's low-level code that's used to boot up the device before its operating
system is loaded, which would make the malware far harder to detect—the first
time Sophos believes that sort of firewall bootkit has ever been seen.

X-Ops never found that bootkit deployed on an actual victim's machine, but
Sophos CISO McKerchar says he can't rule out that it was in fact used somewhere
and evaded detection. “We certainly tried to hunt for it, and we have some
capability to do that,” says McKerchar. “But I would be brash to say it's never
been used in the wild.”

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As Sophos has tried to understand the motives of the Chengdu-based network of
hackers digging up vulnerabilities and providing them to the Chinese state, that
picture has been complicated by the strange fact that the researchers finding
those flaws may have on two occasions also reported them to Sophos itself
through its “bug bounty” program. On one occasion, for instance, the exact
vulnerability used in a hacking campaign was reported to Sophos by a researcher
with a Chinese IP address just after it was first used in an exploitation
campaign—Sophos paid the researcher $20,000 for their findings.

That bizarre incongruity with the Chengdu-based researchers' apparent role as
suppliers of intrusion techniques for Chinese state hacking groups and its bug
bounty reports to Sophos, McKerchar argues, show perhaps how loose the
connections are between the researchers finding these vulnerabilities and the
state hackers exploiting those bugs. “I think this is a security research
community which is patriotically aligned with PRC objectives,” he says,
referencing the People's Republic of China. “But they're not averse to making a
bit of money on the side.”

Contacts at the University of Electronic Science and Technology China didn't
respond to WIRED's request for comment on Sophos' report. Sichuan Silence
Information Technology couldn't be reached for comment, and appears to have no
working website.

Sophos' timeline of its struggle against a highly adaptive adversaries sussing
out its products' hackable flaws points to the success of China's efforts to
corral its security research community and funnel its discoveries of
vulnerabilities to the government, says Dakota Cary, a researcher at the
Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank, who has focused on that Chinese
exploit development pipeline. He points to China's efforts, for instance, to
foster hacking competitions as a source of intrusion techniques for its
offensive hacking efforts, as well as 2021 legislation that requires researchers
and companies based in China to report to the government any hackable bug they
find in a product.

“In Sophos' document, you see the interconnectedness of that system kind of
shine through,” says Cary. “The culture of these organizations working together
or competing for work, and the way that the government is trying to centralize
collection of vulnerabilities and then distribute those tools to offensive
teams—you see all of that reflected.”

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Sophos' report also warns, however, that in the most recent phase of its
long-running conflict with the Chinese hackers, they appear more than ever
before to have shifted from finding new vulnerabilities in firewalls to
exploiting outdated, years-old installations of its products that are no longer
receiving updates. That means, company CEO Joe Levy writes in an accompanying
document, that device owners need to get rid of unsupported “end-of-life”
devices, and security vendors need to be clear with customers about the
end-of-life dates of those machines to avoid letting them become unpatched
points of entry onto their network. Sophos says it's seen more than a thousand
end-of-life devices targeted in just the past 18 months.

“The only problem now isn't the zero-day vulnerability,” says Levy, using the
term “zero-day” to mean a newly discovered hackable flaw in software that has no
patch. “The problem is the 365-day vulnerability, or the 1,500-day
vulnerability, where you've got devices that are on the internet that have
lapsed into a state of neglect.”

That warning was echoed by Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
assistant director for cybersecurity Jeff Greene, who stresses the risk of
Chinese hackers exploiting older, unpatched systems, as well as the broader,
ironic threat of network perimeter appliances serving as entry points for
hackers. “These edge devices often have inherent insecurities, they’re often not
managed once they’re put out, they're not patched," says Greene. “We’ll leave a
trail of these devices for a long time that attackers will be looking to
compromise.”

Sophos CISO McKerchar says the company is revealing its five-year fight with the
Chengdu-based hacking network to amplify those warnings, but also to end a kind
of cybersecurity industry omertà around the growing issue of security companies'
own products creating vulnerabilities for their customers. “Trust in the
industry has been massively eroded in the past few years. There's a huge amount
of skepticism across about the way that vendors are handling these risks, but
we've relied on silence instead,” says McKerchar. “We want to show a bit of
vulnerability ourselves, recognize that we've had problems, then tell the story
about how we stepped up.”






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Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for WIRED covering hacking, cybersecurity, and
surveillance. He’s the author of the new book Tracers in the Dark: The Global
Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. His last book was *Sandworm: A New
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