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Speaker 1: Welcome back everybody. Today, we're going to be looking at

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inside China's cyber war and US defense research. If you've

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been watching the world lately, you know the nature of

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warfare has completely shifted. It's not just about boots on

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the ground. It's not just about who has the biggest

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carrier strikes or the quiet submarines. The most dangerous battles

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being fought right now are helping are happening in silence.

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They're happening on servers, data centers, and the networks of

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our most sensitive institutions. And most Americans have absolutely no

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idea we are actively losing a digital war. But Google's

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Threat intelligence group dropped the bombshell report. They're exposed a massive,

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multi year cyber espionage campaign orchestrated by a highly sophisticated

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threat actor known as UNC sixty five oh eight, a

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China and Nexus state sponsored hacker group, China cyber soldiers

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working directly for the People's Republic of China, and what

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they pulled off should scare the heck out of every

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single one of us. These folks didn't target random infrastructure.

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They went off, They went after the crown jewels. They

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targeted North American medical, academic and military research institutions. The

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place is developing the next gen of American tech medical

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breakthroughs in US defense. I know you're asking, how did

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they get in? They found a weak point in an

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externally facing platform called REDCAP. For those who don't know,

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REDCAP stands for Research Electronic Data Capture. It's a secure

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web application used by scientists, military researchers, and doctors to

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build and manage online databases. It's exactly where you store

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highly classified, highly sensitive data when you're running advanced trials

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UNC sixty five. OHA found a way to crack those

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servers open, and once they got inside, they didn't just

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smash and grab. That's not how these elite state actors operate.

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They play the long game. They deployed a highly customized

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piece of malware called infinitord. Think of infiniture as a

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digital ghost. It's a customer built, custom built tool designed

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for one specific purpose to sit quietly in the show

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shadows of a network, harvest credentials, steal user names and

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passwords passwords, and maintain what the tech world calls persistence.

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They stayed hidden inside some of these environments for over

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a year. Think about that for a second. For twelve

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plus months, Chinese intelligence operators had a backdoor key to

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American military and medical research networks. They were sitting in

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the room virtually reading over the shoulders of our top

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scientists and defense strategists. So what are they looking for?

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Everything that matters for the next fifty years of global dominance.

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They exfiltrated massive trops of data on advanced medical research.

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They stole US defense strategy documents. They targeted advanced technology,

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cutting edge artificial intelligence, and this is the part that

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really hits home. Autonomous and uncrude systems, drone technology, robotic warfare,

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the exact tech that our guys are going to rely

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on in the field to stay alive. If you want

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to defeat America in a conflict ten years from now,

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you don't want to wait for the war to start.

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You steal the bootprints where they're still being written. If

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you want to defeat the soccer team in the World

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Cup before, you don't want to wait for them to

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start implementing their strategy. You want to know what it

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is beforehand if you can. But the technical but the

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technical sophistication didn't stop at the malware. The Google thread

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hunters discovered that these guys were using incredibly novel techniques

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to get the data out of our house and into theirs.

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They actually manipulated Google workspace compliance rules. Think about how

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brilliant this is. They didn't use some loud, aggressive file

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transfer protocol that were triggered alarm. They quietly altered the

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internal administrative rules of the victim organization's own Google system.

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They made the system itself bypass its own security checks,

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treating the data theft like a routine, compliant, autumn heated task.

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By the time security teams realized what was happening, that

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data was already gone. Fortunately, Google's Threat Intelligence group caught

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onto this. They acted. They disrupted the infrastructure of the

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UNC six y five oh eight was running, was using

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to run these operations, and that've been burning the men

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out OZO notifying the effected organizations to help them patch

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the holes and kick these ghosts out. But who is this?

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But who else is there? Who else is in there

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right now that we haven't caught, That's the real question.

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This is not an isolated incident. This is a highly coordinated,

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incredibly well funded, asymmetrical war being waged against the US.

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When we're distracted by the news, nonsense, and the politics.

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Our adversaries are systematically draining our intellectual property and dismantling

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our tech edge. If we don't start taking cybersecurity as

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seriously as we take kinetic warfare, we're gonna wake up

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one day and realize we lost the war before a

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shot wasn't ever fired. Stay safe out there, everyone, and

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stay vigilant.