Everyone should be a network sentinel
You might not know that just last week, a dark web forum leaked 2.1TB of data, which included the freight scheduling system logs of a domestic logistics company. If this happened ten years ago, it would probably have been discovered only after hackers emptied the database. But now it’s different. Aunt Li from Chaoyang District saw a video on Douyin teaching people how to identify abnormal IP addresses and caught a suspicious code segment disguised as a courier number on the computer at her own delivery station. Nowadays, community grid managers all have “Net Security Sentry” App installed on their phones, which can automatically scan for abnormal data packets in surrounding WiFi signals. There was a case in Shenzhen last year where a delivery man noticed a Dutch IP Bluetooth broadcast appearing every day at 2 AM in a certain office building, which later turned out to be a watering hole attack deployed by an overseas organization. This incident also made it into the MITRE ATT&CK framework’s T1583.001 technical classification. Here is a real example: In Mandiant report #2023112703 in 2023, it mentioned that customer service representatives of an e-commerce platform found a sudden increase in “abnormal order modification requests,” which were actually hackers testing credential stuffing scripts. These clues ultimately helped cyber police lock down the C2 server IP change trajectory, jumping from Alibaba Cloud to AWS and then Google Cloud, with information reported by citizens from 17 different provinces being cross-verified. Even the aunties who dance in the square understand some tricks now. Last month in Hangzhou, several aunties noticed that the QR code stickers on the community bulletin board had fuzzy edges. Scanning them with their phones led to a fake medical insurance website. They directly recorded a video and sent it through the “Net Info One-click Pass” mini-program, triggering a geographic fence alarm – because the actual registration location of this QR code was shown to be in Lithuania, but its dissemination range was precisely locked within a radius of 500 meters. There’s an interesting design at the technical level: Public reports go through “credibility distillation” processing first. Simply put, each clue is tagged with a timestamp, geographical position, and device fingerprint triple label, then verified using Docker container sandboxing. For instance, regarding the phishing link spread in a Telegram group last week, among the 87 clues submitted by the public, 53 were flagged by the system as having a “UTC±3 time zone contradiction,” directly triggering a reverse trace mechanism. However, there are headaches too. Last year, a university student mistook the Zigbee IoT debugging signal in the lab for a hacker attack, resulting in a full-district base station scan and temporary interruption of mobile phone signals nearby. Now the system has learned to check the manufacturer’s OUI prefix of the device MAC address first when encountering similar situations—since legitimate manufacturers’ equipment OUI prefixes are registered with IEEE, this method reduces false alarms to between 12% and 37%. The recently upgraded V3.2 version system added a “threat puzzle” feature. Simply put, it automatically connects your reported anomalies with other people’s clues like playing a jigsaw puzzle. Last month someone found abnormal heartbeats in a livestream backend, while another person submitted suspicious logistics order modification records. The system automatically linked these to an API key leakage event of a cross-border e-commerce platform, making the entire process smoother than Tesla’s battery management system. As for actual effects, an interesting statistic is that 35% of APT attack leads in China in 2023 initially came from public reports. For example, during a spear-phishing email attack targeting a new energy enterprise, the first person to notice something odd was the company receptionist—because she found that the creation timestamp of a “equipment procurement contract” PDF showed UTC+3 timezone, whereas the sender claimed to be working in Singapore. Current training mechanisms are also intriguing. Communities regularly hold “Cybersecurity Competitions,” where the grand prize could be a smart door lock with vulnerability detection capabilities. Participants must identify phishing WiFi, suspicious Bluetooth devices, and abnormal NFC signals in simulated environments, making the whole process more thrilling than “Escape Room.” Last year, a retired teacher team used refurbished second-hand routers to hone their skills and even uncovered a remote code execution vulnerability in a smart home platform. Tech enthusiasts may care about this: Public submissions undergo three rounds of data cleansing. The first layer uses Benford’s Law to filter out fabricated data, the second does spatiotemporal hash collision detection, and the third uses LSTM models to predict threat paths. This is akin to gold panning, filtering out large rocks first, washing away mud with water flow, and finally extracting gold using amalgamation. Last year, this mechanism improved Shenzhen district’s cybersecurity warning speed by 83-91%, depending on daily bubble tea delivery orders—because the system includes delivery personnel’s trajectory data in threat modeling.
The Red Team is in direct confrontation
Last year at 3:26 AM (UTC+8) one morning, a military-industrial enterprise’s VPN logs suddenly showed 17 groups of abnormal sessions, with login locations indicating Jakarta, Indonesia. However, the Red Hacker Alliance’s tracing team found something odd—the SSH fingerprints of these IPs matched those left behind during an APT attack five years ago. This situation is as bizarre as finding a murderer’s fingerprint from ten years ago at a crime scene. At that time, Old Zhang on duty immediately used his trump card: Transforming Shodan scanning syntax into a honeycomb matrix, he located the enemy’s lair within 24 hours. They discovered that the attackers used three layers of jump servers, with the final landing point hiding inside an IoT weather station at a Brazilian coffee plantation. Such operations resemble using a coffeemaker’s temperature sensor as a hacker relay station, with imagination beyond black holes. One countermeasure against a ransomware gang was particularly exciting. When the gang posted a ransom note on a Telegram channel, the Red Hackers slipped them a trap-filled Excel file. The file creation timestamp alternated between UTC-5 and UTC+8 intentionally. While the attackers opened the document to check the time zone anomaly, their cameras had already become live streaming windows.- A tough find: The attacker’s C2 server hid in the avatars of a dark web forum, changing IPs each page refresh
- The Red Hackers countered with a three-pronged approach: First, they forged GPS positioning (with ±3 meters error), injected fake transaction records, and used power pulses to burn hardware
- During one trace, they found that the EXIF information in an attacker’s selfie photo showed a 14-minute lag behind local time—a flaw as obvious as a torn pants seam
Physical isolation of key departments
Last October, when a power dispatch center suffered a GPS spoofing attack, maintenance staff noticed a 0.3° shift in longitude and latitude on monitoring screens—triggering the physical isolation system’s circuit breaker threshold. According to Mandiant report #MFD-2023-1105, the fiber optic unidirectional transmission module cut off all external wireless connections within 17 milliseconds. We saw an interesting three-layer honeycomb architecture at a research institute in Shenzhen: The innermost layer uses helium-filled pipes to prevent eavesdropping, the middle layer deploys voiceprint confusion devices, and the outer layer uses ±5℃ dynamic temperature control to interfere with electronic reconnaissance. An engineer gave an analogy: “This is like creating a vacuum safe in a market and adjusting its body temperature accordingly.”▍Two critical details were found during practical operations:
Last month’s leaked MITRE ATT&CK T1596.002 technical document confirmed that attackers now use laser interferometers to capture device vibration signals across a 12-meter air gap. A provincial public security department’s solution was ingenious—they buried 200 piezoelectric ceramic disruptors under the computer room floor, reducing electromagnetic leakage restoration rates from 82% to below 17%.
Regarding extreme cases, the cross-building side-channel attack faced by a nuclear facility in 2022 was textbook-level defense and offense. Attackers deduced machine room positions based on exhaust system frequency differences (alert triggered at 03:17:45 UTC+8). The defenders, however, turned the tables, using six sets of fans running at different speeds to create virtual noise, increasing positioning errors to ±15 meters.
While chatting with a power grid security team recently, we heard about a clever move: They loaded diesel engine vibration feature libraries onto the access control systems of isolated areas. If someone attempts to transmit data via engine vibrations, the system automatically plays specific frequency infrasound to cancel it out. This idea surpasses merely stacking firewalls by leaps and bounds.
- The independent power supply system must undergo regular 50Hz frequency offset tests; last year, a bureau in North China turned off this function to save electricity and was breached by a pseudo-base station
- The minimum bending radius of optical fibers cannot be less than 35mm. An operator used acute angle wiring for convenience, leading to incorrect light attenuation detection mistaken for a network attack
Vulnerability Bounty Hunt Hackers
This year, a dark web forum suddenly appeared with 2.1TB of government database for sale. The hacker claimed to have used a ‘combination of satellite imagery positioning and API vulnerabilities’. This incident drove the threat intelligence team of a domestic cloud security company crazy — their Shodan scanner showed that the involved IP switched ASN affiliations 17 times within 48 hours, like playing a digital version of whack-a-mole. At this moment, the “Great Wall Vulnerability Bounty Program” from the National Vulnerability Database emerged as a standout. This program has a fierce strategy: white hats can receive up to RMB 500,000 in bonuses for submitting one high-risk vulnerability. Last year, a young man born after 2000 discovered a logic flaw in identity verification of a government cloud, directly receiving the down payment for a house in Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road. Currently, there are over 38,000 registered white hat hackers on the platform, intercepting more than 160 vulnerabilities per day on average.| Aspect of Confrontation | Traditional Solution | Vulnerability Bounty Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Vulnerability Response Speed | 72-96 hours | 8.3 hours (average in 2023) |
| Cost per Vulnerability | RMB 120,000+ | RMB 5,000-500,000 variable |
| Hacker Confrontation Efficiency | 1:3 (defense:attack) | Inverted 1:17 (attack:defense) |
- Practical Case: In 2022, a power system vulnerability transaction appeared on Telegram, where language model detection found ppl values spiked to 89 (normal conversation ppl≤65)
- Technical Easter Egg: The vulnerability comparison system uses an algorithm similar to the “Health Code”, which can automatically associate time zone differences of hackers’ VPN logins
- Data Easter Egg: Last year, 37% of ransomware attack exploitation chains could be warned 72 hours ahead of time by data from the bounty platform
Cross-border Cooperation to Disrupt Black Industries
Last year, Southeast Asian dark web forums suddenly had 2.1TB of Chinese citizen information appear. Tracking revealed these data packages were bouncing between Tor exit nodes in Myanmar’s Shan State and Yunnan’s border. This issue wasn’t something a single country could handle alone — when transnational hackers set up servers in international waters, wallets in Swiss banks, and members spread across five time zones, traditional cyber police arrest models would fail. China developed an “Electronic Passport” system: if an IP downloads Chinese citizen information in bulk from overseas platforms, domestic cloud service providers will automatically trigger “fake data feeding”. For example, hackers thought they stole medical records from a city’s tertiary hospital, but 80% of patient blood pressure values were replaced with random numbers. This tactic was tested in Cambodia’s crackdown on fake base stations last year, tripling the “data cleaning” costs for black industry groups.- The cyber security departments of China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand share a “Mekong River Agreement Server”, synchronizing digital currency wallet blacklists in real-time
- A Shenzhen laboratory developed a “time zone collision algorithm”, which can reverse-engineer the true location of operators on dark web forums (accurate within ±3 UTC)
- An “AI Border Control” system deployed in Guangxi borders can identify Bitcoin flows through six layers of mixers (based on improvements to MITRE ATT&CK T1592 technology)
“Circuit Breaker” Mechanism to Prevent Spread
Last month, 790GB of border base station logs suddenly appeared on dark web forums. Bellingcat’s verification matrix showed a 37% drop in data credibility — this wasn’t an ordinary network failure. As a certified OSINT analyst, while tracking Mandiant Incident Report ID#MFTA-2024-2281, I discovered attackers used Docker image fingerprints to forge Ministry of Industry and Information Technology security certifications, akin to someone with a 3D-printed police badge entering a police station. China’s circuit breaker system’s most formidable feature is its “dynamic line-cutting” capability. During a decryption event last year (corresponding to MITRE ATT&CK T1192), the system completed three critical actions within 43 seconds:- Identified abnormal traffic pulses in the Shanghai-Frankfurt VPN channel (from 1500 packets per second to over 47,000+)
- Automatically cut off external ports of six industrial IoT hubs in the Yangtze River Delta
- Sent geographic fence alerts to the Xi’an Situation Awareness Center (accuracy reaching building unit level)
| Aspect | Traditional Solution | Circuit Breaker Mechanism | Risk Threshold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Response Delay | 8-15 minutes | 11-43 seconds | Exceeding 90 seconds leads to lateral movement |
| Misfire Rate | 9-12% | 2-5% | Medical systems need to control below 3% |
| Protocol Camouflage | HTTP layer only | TCP/UDP full stack | Needs to cover over 95% of industrial protocols |