Is The ‘Great Firewall Of China’ A Gateway For Hackers?

As news headlines abound documenting state-sponsored Chinese hacking of Fortune 500 companies to steal data, researchers have found evidence that at least some of those hackers have been selling access to the computers they’ve compromised in order to help set the stage for future breaches.

According to Brian Krebs on his blog, the “Great Firewall of China” — which is the informal moniker given to the Chinese government’s efforts to blocks citizens from certain websites — has given rise to virtual private networks (VPN) that allow users to set up Internet connections that lie beyond the reach of the Chinese authorities.

Krebs said on Tuesday (Aug. 4) that VPN services are being marketed to Web surfers who seek to avoid censorship but are also launchpads for hacks on non-Chinese companies, according to findings from RSA Research.

RSA has named this setup the “Terracotta VPN.” The research firm posits that the group behind Terracotta is known by various aliases, including “Shell_Crew” and “Deep Panda.” This group has links to some of the most spectacular data breaches in the United States, including the recent “break-ins” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. RSA estimates that the VPN has more than 1,500 “nodes” across the globe, which can be used to gain access to the Internet, tied to servers in the U.S., Japan and Korea.

But many of the Terracotta “exit nodes,” RSA found, are in fact servers that have been “harvested” without legitimate operators’ permission (or even knowledge), with victims ranging from a Fortune 500 hotel chain, manufacturers and even county-level government offices in the U.S.

The RSA report provided a step-by-step process illustrating how servers were broken into by remote hackers and then eventually consumed into the Terracotta VPN base. RSA said there have been at least 52 Terracotta nodes set up.

And, as Krebs noted, “the idea of hackers selling access to hacked PCs for anonymity and stealth online is hardly a new one.”

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