Cyber experts start getting called into electric, water, pipeline, railway, and transportation hubs around the country. Hackers have found a clever way to embed in these systems, using a small, unsuspecting device in everyday Americans’ homes. And once these hackers get in, they’re not dropping the usual malware, or sucking much of any data out. Unlike their predecessors, these hackers are very careful to cover their tracks. It appears they’re just lying in wait. Sleeper cells waiting for marching orders. So what’s the trigger? And what happens if they pull it?
Chapter 1: What is 'living off the land' in cyber hacking?
It's 2020. We start spotting Chinese hackers tucked deep inside our infrastructure, quiet, patient, just waiting. The industry calls this living off the land, but don't let that rustic name fool you. These hacks are far from harmless. They're sleeper cells waiting for marching orders. We just didn't know what exactly. Here's Kevin Mandia.
And all of a sudden we see Chinese threat groups since about late 2020, at least from my observables, hack in and we don't know why, because they're not the tank through the cornfield. They're hacking in and just, that's it. There's no other activity. And then you're like, why are they there? And it's maybe they have access later. Maybe it's to mine user IDs and passphrases.
There's no better way to compromise any organization then you can just log in, period. It's the best way to breach an organization is log into it the same way the employees do. There's just no evidence. And that's what living off the land means. There's no malicious code. There's no backdoor. There's good operational security. If they created a log file that's suspicious, they would edit it.
When they wanted to go surreptitious, they were good at it. And that's the thing about digital evidence. You can edit it or delete it. You can change it. It's different than the physical world. You can do some wonderful things if you're on offense and you have the patience and time and skill to do it.
By this point, you almost certainly understand the CCP absolutely has the patience, time, and skill. But in theory, so do we. So how did we let it get this far? How did we allow China's hackers to so intimately invade our most critical infrastructure? I'm Nicole Prolorath, and this is To Catch a Thief.
The answer to that question of how we let things get this out of hand is where a number of trends converge. I've walked you through China's hacking advancements and the creeping emergency of global supply chains. But what made this the perfect storm was our uniquely American blind spots.
for one despite the impression left by snowden the nsa and other u.s intelligence agencies aren't actually in your private networks watching what you do or in this case what chinese hackers are doing not without running straight into the fourth amendment the nsa is a foreign intelligence agency It hunts for threats abroad.
Its charter doesn't allow it to hunt for hackers on private American networks, not without a warrant or a special court order. And what you need to understand is that the vast majority of U.S. critical infrastructure — pipelines, the power grid, water, hospitals — more than 80% of it is in private sector hands. meaning the government has no visibility into it.
They can't deflect attacks on those private systems or even hunt there unless they've got a court order or they're invited in. To a large degree, when it comes to these living off the land attacks, we're flying blind. Our second big gaping vulnerability is that the United States is among the most digitally dependent nations on earth.
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Chapter 2: How are Chinese hackers infiltrating U.S. infrastructure?
While the White House dithers back and forth on TikTok, few Americans have ever even heard of TP-Link. And I get it. When you buy a home router, you don't care what brand you get. You just want it to work. TP-Link's routers are ubiquitous and easily forgotten. If you've bought a home or small office router recently, chances are your data is flowing through TP-Link. In fact, go on Amazon right now.
Search the words home router. And Amazon's overall pick is a TP-Link router. It's by far the cheapest option, as in less than half the cost of its next closest competitor. TP-Link's share of the U.S. router market has exploded from 10% in 2019 to over 60% today. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, which found that TP-Link's share of next-gen Wi-Fi systems is even higher, 80%.
And as early as October 2023, China's Volt Typhoon hackers started using TP-Link routers to burrow into U.S. infrastructure. Now, to be clear, TP-Link isn't the only brand they've used. But what makes TP-Link different is this. It's a Chinese company. It was started by two Chinese brothers and for three decades operated from Shenzhen. But last year, TP-Link split in two.
One base stayed in China, while the other moved its new official headquarters to Irvine, California to serve the U.S. market. TP-Link wants you to believe this split means it's no longer Chinese. And as this episode was coming together, TP-Link's general counsel sent me a tersely worded message saying, quote, Any claim TP-Link is a Chinese company is, quote, unlawful and legally actionable.
According to this lawyer, quote, TP-Link is a US-based company that manufactures routers for the US market in Vietnam. But a week after TP-Link's lawyers put me on notice, Bloomberg published its own investigation, which found that Vietnam is effectively just a final assembly point. Their words, that only half a percent of TP-Link's components come from Vietnam.
The rest are still imported from China. And then there's what Rob Joyce, the NSA's former cybersecurity chief, testified to Congress and told our live panel podcast in March. He testified that TP-Link's push into the U.S. isn't just smart business. It's strategic. Rob told us the company is selling its routers at a loss, a deliberate move to flood the U.S.
with cheap routers and build what he called a PRC platform.
How have they achieved this miraculous growth? They appear to be selling at price points below profitability to drive out our Western competition. TP-Link routers were among the various brands exploited by Chinese state-sponsored hackers in the massive Volt, Flax, and Salt typhoon attacks.
Imagine these routers in the homes and businesses across America as a PRC platform to launch society-panicking cyber attacks This is a threat we cannot ignore. The company is selling them at unprofitable levels and they're driving out the Western and US manufacturers. It's exponential growth.
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