Supply Chain Attacks: How China Backdoored the World

Omaid Faizyar
2 min readOct 5, 2018

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Pictured: An actual photo of a Chinese hacker.

Pack your bags folks, it’s over. China won the Cyberwar. China is in such a good position to backdoor the computer networks of any Government it’s not even funny. The Chinese are absolute geniuses, using the cheap labor to create a monopoly on manufacturing worldwide. Not only are they cheap, but at this point there isn’t a manufacturing ability set up as an alternative.

Supply-Chain Attacks are China’s Modus Operandi regarding Cyberwarfare.

They have been caught backdooring Huawei phones and even CCleaner to infiltrate American companies.

Backdoors > 0days

The NSA spends billions every year developing exploits while China mass produces hardware implants the size of a rice grain to simply backdoor what’s coming out of their own country.

Who needs an 0day when you have a hardware backdoor? The NSA had its own team to create hardware backdoors called TAO, who would intercept hardware shipments and physically create a backdoor. This compares nothing to China who can literally do this at scale and while the hardware is literally being created within the factory.

China’s Endgame

What does this mean for China in the grand scheme of things? You can assume that any critical network and infrastructure within the USA and its allies has been backdoored one way or another by China. This is a critical advantage, it’s their insurance policy.

A war between superpowers in the 21st century is going to look very, very different. Previous wars were about body counts. Future wars will focus on the common man. Money, infrastructure, trade. Why use tanks, when you can use banks? China already has an upper-hand on the latter. You can’t exactly sanction electronics manufacturing.

If you want to cripple a city you no longer need to bomb their infrastructure as the Americans did in Iraq during their post-9/11 revenge fantasy. Just disable their power, plumbing, and other services and the people in the city will destroy it for you.

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Omaid Faizyar
Omaid Faizyar

Written by Omaid Faizyar

I hack into companies for a living and dabble in Bitcoin. Sometimes get quoted on Russia Today.