Google discloses its hack and points the finger squarely at Beijing, which spells the end for Google’s business ambitions in China. Other victims stay silent, too fearful to offend the gatekeepers to the world’s largest market. Nobody will talk. Until they came for The New York Times. In Episode 2, host and former lead cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter for The New York Times, Nicole Perlroth outlines what happened when she learns hackers are inside the Times. Mandiant is called. The malware traces back to a Chinese military unit based in Shanghai. Hackers’ digital crumbs make clear they are after one reporter: David Barboza. Just as he is putting the finishing touches on a massive, years-long investigation on the secret wealth of Chinese leaders and their families. Nicole recounts the behind-the-scenes build-up to the hack that started edging victims into the light.
Chapter 1: Why did Google consider leaving China?
Google is threatening to pull out of China over computer attacks that pride into the email accounts of human rights activists. Google also says it will stop censoring its search results in China. The government bans politically and socially sensitive content. The change of heart had people leaving flowers at Google's Beijing headquarters.
And President Obama says he backs the right of internet freedom in China.
Another sign of support, bouquets of flowers appeared outside Google's headquarters in Beijing. China's government has refused to comment specifically on the issue, other than to say it wants to foster a healthy Internet community according to their laws and regulations.
Google, the search engine, making some major changes in China. Google may pull out of the country completely. because of China's censorship rules. The announcement triggering an outpouring of concern from internet users in China. Supporters even placing flowers and notes at the company's locations in China.
It's January of 2010. Google has just come forward. They publish a blog post announcing they've, quote, detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China. The uproar is immediate. But rather than trigger an avalanche of disclosures, things went the other way.
China is slamming Google for pulling out of the communist country. Google's moving operations to Hong Kong in a battle against Chinese censorship. China called Google's move to Hong Kong totally wrong, says the search engine broke promises to play by the government's rules.
Most of Google's China-based web search functions have moved to Hong Kong. This step has opened a new phase in the two-month long battle over censorship that's pitted the world's most powerful internet company against a government that tightly restricts the flow of information in the planet's most populous market.
Google versus China in a censorship fight. The internet giant makes a move and starts to pull out of China. Felicia Taylor in New York with the details. So Felicia, so does Google's Chinese website still exist?
Yeah, absolutely, Kira. It does still exist, but it actually only redirects users to its site in Hong Kong, which is uncensored.
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Chapter 2: What was the reaction to Google's decision on censorship?
It was the emails of senior officials, including the U.S. Ambassador to China, Nick Burns, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. They downloaded 60,000 emails from the State Department alone. All told, they read through emails belonging to more than 500 people at 22 different organizations, all through this one hack of Microsoft. But back to 2010.
Aside from Google, few victims ever stepped forward. Hacking was treated as a crime of shame. As a reporter at the New York Times, trying to get these companies to go on the record was a fool's errand. Nobody would talk. That is, until they came for us. In the fall of 2012, I got a tip that there were hackers inside the Times.
Outside of our security team, almost no one at the paper was aware of the hack. I was told, tell no one. Our security team had made the oh shit call. They brought in Mandiant. Their analysts traced the malware back to a familiar foe, a group Mandiant internally called APT1. It was a particularly brazen unit of the Chinese military based in Shanghai called Unit 61398.
Our immediate concern was sabotage. This was just two months ahead of the 2012 presidential elections. Our security team was worried this might be an attempt to mess with our coverage. I embedded with our security engineers and watched the hacker we affectionately came to call the PLA summer intern. Every day, they'd roll into our networks at 9 a.m. Shanghai time and roll out around 5.
They'd phished us. And then they'd started moving laterally, making their way through 53 of my colleagues' computers. Out of an abundance of caution, our IT team confiscated every one of those machines. Confused colleagues would show up to work and find post-it notes where their computers had once been. These notes just said, We have your computer. Signed, IT. Without further explanation.
Tracking these hackers, I got a sense for Heather's paranoia. There were some nights I'd return home to my empty apartment and wonder if these Chinese hackers had followed me home. When my cable box started making strange sounds, I convinced myself hackers were inside. But based on hackers' queries and other digital crumbs, these hackers weren't there for me.
And they weren't there to shut us down. At least not yet. They were after our sources. And the sources for one reporter in particular.
Right, right. So David Barboza, and I'm a former New York Times correspondent.
The very same month I got the first tip about the Chinese hackers in our systems, David had been putting the finishing touches on a massive, years-long investigation about the secret wealth of Chinese leaders and their families. Clearly, the party was on to David's reporting, and they were after his sources. But the irony was that his investigation wasn't based on a deep throat.
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Chapter 3: How did the Google hack unfold?
In about May of 2012, we started to notice that maybe someone was on to what we were doing. And people started to question our driver, the New York Times driver for the Bureau in Shanghai, and some of my colleagues. And so in July of 2012, I said to The Times, we're quite nervous. We think they're on our trail. We don't know for sure, but they're asking questions.
I think I should come back and finish the article in New York.
David starts shoving sensitive documents in safes. He shreds any he doesn't need. Over the next few weeks and months, he carts suitcases chock full of documents. from Shanghai to New York, then Tokyo, until he approaches something close to a final draft. I was going to ask, what's going to happen at the airport if anyone opens the suitcase?
They would be like, wow, your Chinese is really good. Because it was all in a lot of Chinese documents.
That September, unbeknownst to David, the hacking begins. But his anxieties were elsewhere.
I just scrambled every day thinking, if I get anything wrong, it's the end of my career. Believe it or not, the scariest thing for me about this story was not that the Chinese government was going to capture me or arrest me or kill me. The scariest thing was that The New York Times was going to capture me and kill me because I had gotten something wrong about it and that I would have no career.
So I had both the excitement of this great story, but also the fear that a lot can go wrong when you're dealing with this many documents in a foreign language with so many moving parts.
Finally, David makes it to the home stretch. He starts making calls. He calls the family members of China's prime minister and their business associates to walk them through everything he has.
We started to call the people who were involved with the family of the prime minister and get them on the phone, which was so important to, you know, it's great to do something based on documents, but you always need someone who's been involved with those documents to say, what do they mean? Do they mean what I think they mean? Is this true?
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