14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past few months, the United States has accused China on numerous occasions of hacking into critical systems in an attempt to steal classified information. However, as expected, the US is not an innocent victim.
More recently, China has started to hit back. After being accused of stealing the designs of over two dozen weapon systems, Chinese officials said they had mountains of data to prove that the US was hacking them.
According to China’s CERT, in the first quarter of 2013, US-based servers were used to hijack over 2.9 million mainframes in China.
In addition, the now famous NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, has also revealed that the US is “hacking everyone everywhere.”
Foreign Policy reports that the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) has a highly secretive unit, called the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which has been hacking into foreign computer systems for almost 15 years.
TAO is headquartered in the NSA’s Fort Meade complex in Maryland and only a small number of the agency’s employees have access to it.
Former NSA officials have told Foreign Policy that TAO collects intel on foreign targets – China and other countries – by hacking into their computers and stealing the data stored on hard drives.
The core of TAO lies in an operations center called the Remote Operations Center (ROC), where 600 military and civilian hackers work 24/7 on finding and penetrating computer systems used by terrorists and other adversaries.
The software used by the NSA to compromise computers and intercept communications is custom-built by a team of skilled computer scientists and software engineers of the Data Network Technologies Branch.
One of TAO’s units, the Access Technologies Operations Branch, helps the CIA and the FBI plant eavesdropping systems on computers and telecommunications infrastructures located overseas.
According to Matthew M. Aid, the author of “The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency,” it’s likely that China is well aware of the existence of TAO.
US President Barack Obama said he pressed his Chinese counterpart during their latest meeting on the issue of cyber espionage. However, this is unlikely considering that China is probably aware of what the US is doing.
“As any high-stakes poker player knows, you can only press your luck so far when the guy on the other side of the table knows what cards you have in your hand,” Aid noted.