# Chinese Nation-State Hackers Target U.S in Operation TradeSecret

**[eweek.com/security/chinese-nation-state-hackers-target-u.s-in-operation-tradesecret](https://www.eweek.com/security/chinese-nation-state-hackers-target-u.s-in-operation-tradesecret)**

April 6, 2017

[Cybersecurity](https://www.eweek.com/security/)

By

[Sean Michael Kerner](https://www.eweek.com/author/sean-michael-kerner/)

April 6, 2017

The National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) website was allegedly infiltrated by Chinese
[nation-state threat actors, according to a new report from Fidelis Cybersecurity. The attack](https://www.fidelissecurity.com/TradeSecret)
against the NFTC site has been dubbed ‘Operation TradeSecret’ by Fidelis and is seen as an
attempt to gain insight into individuals closely associated with U.S trade policy activities.

Fidelis is attributing the Operation TradeSecret attack to a group that is also known in the
security research community as APT10 and Stone Panda. The same attack group has also
been recently actively attacking government sites in the U.K and Japan in an attack that
PWC UK and BAE Systems refers to as, [Operation CloudHopper.](https://www.pwc.co.uk/issues/cyber-security-data-privacy/insights/operation-cloud-hopper.html)

With Operation TradeSecret, the attackers were able to infiltrate the NFTC site and embed
malware on several registration pages. The malware used is identified by Fidelis as being
the Scanbox reconnaissance framework. The Scanbox malware is used by attackers to gain
insight into victim’s activities and information. According to Fidelis, the attack ran from
February 27 to March 1 of this year. John Bambenek, Threat Systems Manager at Fidelis
said that his company has informed the NFTC of the incident.

“At a high-level, this method of attack is common and has been seen against the defense
industrial base and telecoms by APT10 for many years,” Bambenek told eWEEK.


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From a detection perspective, Bambenek explained that Fidelis security tools are informed
by the company’s threat intelligence team, a portion of which is dedicated to nation-state
adversaries.

“Those tools derive an immense amount of metadata about every session, so that we can
find distinct fingerprints that point to a specific actor,” Bambenek said. “We are also able to
apply intelligence retroactively, so as we discover new threats we can look backwards weeks
and months to see if attacks have been successful in the past.”

From an attribution perspective for the new Operation TradeSecret campaign, there are a
number of attributes that clearly point the finger at Chinese nation-state attackers. Bambenek
commented that Scanbox is a tool exclusively seen previously being used by Chinese
nation-state sponsored actors.

“The specific obfuscation and other techniques in this instance have been used in the past
only by APT10,” Bambenek said. “It is possible that another actor somehow got their hands
on these tools and are mimicking the techniques, but it is not likely.”

At this point, it’s not entirely clear how the Operation TradeSecret attackers were actually
able to infiltrate the NFTC site and embed the Scanbox malware. Bambenek commented
that Fidelis can only speculate as to how this happened to their website. That said he noted
that in general terms, there are a number of different things organizations can use to help
defend themselves.

Bambenek recommends that organizations use a strong web-application firewall (WAF) to
prevent against attacks on their webserver and database layer and have integrity monitoring
on webpages to detect unauthorized changes. Additionally, he suggests that organizations
work with their peers in the industry to share threat data, so that soft targets around
government can collaboratively protect themselves against foreign intelligence services.


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