"A senior PLA colonel said, ‘You have this firm line between political military espionage and technological espionage. That line doesn't exist for us. When we steal technology, we are building our economic base. We are building our national security.’” –Jim Lewis, Center for Strategic and International Studies
By the early 2010s, hackers employed by the Chinese government had taken their campaign against internal dissidents abroad and were treating major U.S. media outlets like the New York Times as targets. But how did they get so good at hacking? How did a team of hackers assessed as being much less skillful than their Russian counterparts—even “polite,” to quote one cybersecurity expert—launch perhaps the most dangerous campaign of espionage in American history?
That story begins in much less splashy territory: with rice, and white paint, and a country looking to pull itself out of poverty by any means necessary.
Check out the third episode of To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy and find out how Western companies became collateral damage in this clash of civilizations.
Breaking the rules of spycraft
When Deng Xiaoping took power in China after Mao's death, the country was isolated and poor. Deng was determined to raise the nation's standard of living in order to reestablish the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, even if it meant rejecting orthodox Marxism. Under his regime, China invited Western companies to invest in Chinese joint ventures. Most were attracted by access to cheap labor and the economic potential of the world's largest consumer market.
But there was a catch.
Chinese industrial espionage was rampant. Intellectual property (IP) and know-how (like DuPont's hardy rice strains and a long-guarded formula for sun-resistant bright white paint) quickly being lifted and reproduced by Chinese firms. The Chinese saw it as reparations for the century of national humiliation at the hands of the West that followed the Opium Wars.
And Western companies were still making too much money to rock the boat.
Then in the early 2000s, China got fully connected to the Internet. Suddenly, IP theft was a problem for Western companies outside China as well. The United States and other Western countries historically saw a difference between normal spying (mostly acceptable) and the emerging practice of cyber industrial espionage (unacceptable). So the West was caught flat-footed.
While Chinese hackers were not the most skilled, there were a lot of them. They were very determined and many of their corporate targets didn't take cybersecurity seriously.
One of the greatest transfers of intellectual property in history was underway.
To Catch A Thief
Over the next month Nicole Perlroth, bestselling author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends and former lead cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter for The New York Times, will take us on a tour of China’s sprawling hacking operations. This first of its kind, deeply reported audio documentary will unfold weekly through dozens of chilling conversations with industry and government cyber espionage experts.
To Catch a Thief charts the rise of China’s state-sponsored hackers, from their beginnings as “the most polite, mediocre hackers in cyberspace” to the “apex predator” that now haunts America’s most critical infrastructure.
The series features the experience and expertise of some of cybersecurity’s heaviest hitters: Jim Lewis, Mandiant’s Kevin Mandia, Crowdstrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch, Google’s Heather Adkins and many more.
Check out this nine-episode series (produced by Rubrik) on your favorite podcast platform.