Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace Read Online Free PDF Page B

corporations have their irons in the fire, and are salivating at ever-increasing defence budgets for Internet surveillance. There is considerable vested self-interest in inflating the threat, and during our GhostNet probe (and ever since) our efforts have been to ensure accuracy and to establish a standard. Universities have a special role to play as stewards of evidence-based, impartial research on cyber security, and we needed to ensure that the GhostNet report weighed all of the available evidence as impartially as possible.
    In the end,
Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network
, chronicled a landmark case in cyber espionage. The scopeand importance of the victims, sophistication of the attack (given the negligible resources used to pull it off), detailed exposure of what was going on beneath the surface and, finally, the shock of such widespread infiltration made it so. We are used to our computers being windows onto the world. With GhostNet, we argued that “it is time to get used to them looking back at us.”
    •  •  •
    “It’ll be on the front page,” John Markoff of the
New York Times
told me hours before the GhostNet story appeared, and he was right. It was above the fold on Sunday, March 29, 2009, and soon thereafter became one of the top news stories in the world. The University of Toronto’s media relations office was overwhelmed. There were satellite trucks parked outside of the Munk School of Global Affairs, where we are based, cameras everywhere, and I experienced my first media scrum. Later, I had to switch off my mobile phone because it never stopped ringing, and eventually I had to change my number altogether. While I was at the Citizen Lab, my home phone was barraged with calls; our children fielding messages in the early mornings from reporters in Europe and Asia just as confused as they were. There were surreal moments watching the Dalai Lama on television being asked to comment on our report, and Chinese government officials dismissing us as liars. Liu Weimin, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in London, said the report was part of the Dalai Lama’s “media and propaganda campaign,” while foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said that we were haunted by a “Cold War ghost” and suffered from a “virus called the China threat.”
    “We have no secrets to hide,” the Dalai Lama told CNN. “They should spy more, then they would know what we are doing.” He soon got his wish. A few months later, our group (working thistime with the U.S.-based volunteer computer security group, the Shadowserver Foundation) revisited the GhostNet campaign and returned to the Dalai Lama’s headquarters to re-examine their computers. We found that they were thoroughly compromised, again, this time by a different China-based espionage campaign. We dubbed it the Shadow Network, “Shadows” for short. Although Shadows was largely restricted to India-related victims, this time we were able to recover copies of data stolen by the attackers as they were being removed from victims’ computers. They had exfiltrated documents marked “Secret” from the Indian national security agency, private business information from Indian defence and intelligence contractors, and a year’s worth of the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s official and private correspondence with citizens, world leaders, and religious figures.
    The GhostNet and Shadows probes (Shadows was also covered extensively in the media) exposed us to a subterranean world of political intrigue, but our findings were not entirely unexpected. We had been gathering evidence for nearly a decade, lifting the lid on the Internet and tracking a contest for the future of cyberspace that was becoming more intense with each passing year. The signposts were clear: cyberspace was changing fast, and not necessarily for the better.

2.
Filters and Chokepoints
    “I have no idea what the Internet is!”
    —Hayastan Shakarian, aged