> Anti-cheat software seems like a great platform to launch targeted malware in-order to achieve a beachhead on a computer network: highly targeted, and effectively undetectable.

> I would expect most software developers don't sandbox their gaming machines from their work-from-home environments.

I have been worried about this for some time. In my country we have a lot of issues with metadata retention so I set something up like this[0].

I have separate VLANs:

• VLAN 1: Management (no tag, null route)

• VLAN 2: Untrusted (routes direct to ISP via ppp0)

• VLAN 3: Trusted (routes direct to ISP via ppp0)

• VLAN 4: Trusted (routes via tun0 - VPN connection for private browsing etc)

• VLAN 5: Null route for devices that do not require internet access of any kind, desk phones printers etc.

(Doesn't have to be a Raspberry Pi, you can use anything that Alpine Linux runs on which is x86_64, x86, ppc64le, s390x, armhf, aarch64 (ARM8 like Raspberry Pi 3), armv7 (Raspberry Pi 2, and friends).[1]

[0] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Linux_Router_with_VPN_on_a...

[1] https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/

The idea is that anything on VLAN2 is completely segregated at the switch and router level from the rest of my network.

Upgrading to managed switches, I had thought about making a bunch of VLANs in a similar manner. But I ended up settling on something much simpler.

There are essentially just two segments / types of switch ports (I may have stuck with the many-vlans thing if switch ports had RGB LEDs showing what zone they were in...). First, the "trusted" network, which does switch management, servers, reasonably-behaved hosts, etc.

Then, a second "access" segment. Ports in this segment are setup to not be able to talk to one another through the switching fabric at all - the only thing they can talk to is the router. Ports on the same switch are prohibited from talking by the switch's config, and different switches are given different associated VLANs. This is good for visitors, Android, Internet of Trash, etc.

For routing, the horizon seen by each device is controlled directly by its own macaddr on the router itself. Two hosts on the same segment can see drastically different routing tables and Internet connections. This isn't perfect, as it can be easily spoofed unless I start pushing the switchport-mac mapping out to the switches. But it works for now.

But I believe "sandboxing" in the original comment was talking about the machine itself, not network access. So PC gaming means being disciplined about getting another machine, or at least a second GPU for PCIE passthrough in a VM. In general I think we're in a time of decommodification. The easiest way to sandbox between security boundaries is separate machines, of which there is an inexpensive surplus of. No need to have banking and games on the same tablet, when a second hand nexus7 (flo) is $40 on fleabay.

Carefully constructing a household network topology and being disciplined with separate physical machines appears to be a strong mitigation.

But will your colleagues who play competitive online games be willing to buy a separate machine used only for remote employment, and be willing (and able) to construct such a network topology correctly?

Most household routers don't even support VLANs.

> Then, a second "access" segment. Ports in this segment are setup to not be able to talk to one another through the switching fabric at all - the only thing they can talk to is the router. Ports on the same switch are prohibited from talking by the switch's config, and different switches are given different associated VLANs. This is good for visitors, Android, Internet of Trash, etc.

Yes essentially that's what VLAN 3 and 4 are (trusted). They are able to talk to each other but VLAN 2 (untrusted) cannot. VLAN 2 cannot access my server on the LAN or any other network resources, except in certain situations where I open a single HTTP port to a specific directory that is read/only. This is where guests would be. I use this to copy 'certain' files to my untrusted hosts. The exploitation surface area is extremely low. Switch configuration can only occur when on VLAN 1 (management). I also can control which VLAN people access via WiFi via my Unifi Controller. One SSID is a trusted network, the other is untrusted. I only use EAP so I can control exactly what users have access to what VLANs via FreeRadius. All of this is documented [0][1]

> For routing, the horizon seen by each device is controlled directly by its own macaddr on the router itself.

Remember MAC Addresses can be spoofed which means you can get things like VLAN hopping if you're not careful. My Windows machine where my gaming happens is "untrusted" and is in port 2 on the switch, my trusted machines are in port 3 and 4. My other family members also have certain devices they consider 'trusted' and those are in VLAN 3/4 while they have devices that are 'untrusted' in VLAN 2. It took some time to educate everyone, but I drew pictures, and explained it nicely. Unfortunately this is the world we currently live in.

I was concerned that a APT (advanced persistent threat) might have the time to monitor the system for idleness and then attempt such an activity. At least that is what I would do.

> But I believe "sandboxing" in the original comment was talking about the machine itself, not network access.

Well they are sort of the same thing in this situation because it's physical sandboxing.

> So PC gaming means being disciplined about getting another machine, or at least a second GPU for PCIE passthrough in a VM.

> In general I think we're in a time of decommodification. The easiest way to sandbox between security boundaries is separate machines, of which there is an inexpensive surplus of.

Exactly.

No need to have banking and games on the same tablet, when a second hand nexus7 (flo) is $40 on fleabay.

This is exactly my point. In regard to my mobile phone I use a Redmi Note 5, with LineageOS, without Google Apps. If I tablet gamed I would have a 7" tablet specifically for that. I would tether it to my phone via WiFi AP and the CPU/GPU would probably be more powerful than you'd get in a phone anyway.

I only install things through F-Droid. I have made a significant attempt to de-google my life and have been successful.

Right now all I have on there is

• andOTP org.shadowice.flocke.andotp

• AnySoftKeyboard com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard

• Barcode Scanner com.google.zxing.client.android

• BusyBox ru.meefik.busybox

• Call Recorder com.github.axet.callrecorder

• DAVx⁵ at.bitfire.davdroid - Used for syncing with my private Radicale instance.

• Draw com.simplemobiletools.draw.pro

• F-Droid org.fdroid.fdroid

• Fennec F-Droid org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid

• Flym net.frju.flym - RSS yay.

• Ghost Commander com.ghostsq.commander

• K-9 Mail com.fsck.k9

• Maps com.github.axet.maps - Provides a native experience for OSM maps. If I need Google Maps I just use a web browser.

• Markor net.gsantner.markor - Awesome text editor/markdown editor

• MuPDF viewer com.artifex.mupdf.viewer.app

• oandbackup dk.jens.backup

• OpenKeychain org.sufficientlysecure.keychain - PGP mail yes.

• OpenTasks org.dmfs.tasks - Used for syncing tasks with my private Radicale instance

• OpenVPN for Android de.blinkt.openvpn

• primitive ftpd org.primftpd - I upload/download via sftp to my phone without plugging it in with ssh keys (ie /sdcard/.ssh/authorized/keys)

  sftp_phone() {lftp sftp://user:DUMMY@{{ IP_OF_PHONE }} -e 'set sftp:connect-program "ssh -a -x -o KexAlgorithms=diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256 -o MACs=hmac-sha2-512,hmac-sha2-256 -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa"'}

• RedReader org.quantumbadger.redreader

• Revolution IRC io.mrarm.irc - Yeah I still use IRC and not IRC bridges, yet with Riot because of https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2320

• Riot.im im.vector.alpha

• Share to Clipboard com.tengu.sharetoclipboard

• Silence org.smssecure.smssecure

• VLC org.videolan.vlc

[0]: http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Linux_Router_with_VPN_on_a_...

[1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Linux_Router_with_VPN_on_a...

To put it in term of your network, I didn't want to deal with having to differentiate between VLAN3/VLAN4 switch ports (and wanted to leave room to grow multiple outgoing VPNs).

Also I don't see the need for hosts on VLAN2 to be able to talk to one another. Which enables me to default to putting decently trustable things in my access zone as well (like say an RPi running Raspbian/Kodi).

> Remember MAC Addresses can be spoofed which means you can get things like VLAN hopping if you're not careful

Oh for sure, which is why I alluded to eventually pushing out per-port mac address config to the switches. But my primary concern is browser/pocketsurveillance traffic not going out my ISP's IP, and this suffices for now.

(Thanks for the dump of Free android apps you find useful. Not really on topic for the thread, but I personally appreciate it)

40% ownership won't grant them the ability to abuse the anti-cheat software, unless I misunderstand how partial ownership works.

It's not like an additional 11% ownership and voting rights would prompt the board to pass a motion to begin using Fortnite to spy for China.

The benefit of partial ownership (or dual ownership) is that it opens up the network of internal employees and management to recruitment while also providing plausible cover as it is a branded and well-known "western" firm

They only need to get another 11% to vote with them.(assuming they have 40% voting representation).

That's one or two other shareholders you need to bribe / convince. Not difficult, especially when the company you just invested in is learning what it's like to have scrooge McDuck money and want more.

> They only need to get another 11% to vote with them.(assuming they have 40% voting representation).

This depends a lot on who owns the other 60%. If it's one other party, the 40% effectively has no control. If it's a public company with a million other owners and they're the largest individual shareholder, many of the others won't even show up to vote their shares and their 40% of all shares will generally be >50% of the ones that show up to vote for anything.

It's a private firm, and the voting example I gave isn't really that good.

A more reasonable case is that they can heavily influence what contractors and 3rd parties are used for projects. Not something that needs a board vote, but something a 40% shareholder has a lot of say in.

I imagine they don't hold a vote on whether to put backdoors or not on a board meeting. So that raises the question. If not like that, then how does it actually happen?

You just go to the executives and point out that you own 40% of the ownership, and you'd really like them to hire these couple of guys and put them on this team, and then not ask too many questions about what they're doing, or you'll use your 40% ownership to make their lives more difficult, which at 40% can easily involve ousting them personally. (See other people's comments about the difficulty of getting enough voters to actually vote to prevent a 40% stake from being the vote winner.)

The literal thing I just said isn't even that unethical; suppose you own 100% of a company, then telling it to hire someone specific and pay them this much and put them here would be fully within your rights as owner. (There's probably a legal hurdle or two to clear, but AFAIK it's nothing that will actually stop you.) How that changes ethically as your ownership stake decreases I'll leave as an exercise for the reader. What's unethical is what they'll be doing when they get there, and who else is tainted ethically depends on how much they know and what they do about it.

The other examples are public companies. Epic Games isn’t. Something shady could still happen but there are only a few shareholders that control the vast majority of the company. I think a few other firms and the founder.

A bit too legion of Doom in retrospect.

But you would get to heavily influence what contractors and vendors the company works with are good vectors.

As well as partnership and integrations.

They don't need to do anything with shareholders to spy on anybody.

Heck, if China wants to spy on anybody, they don't even need to resort to technology to begin with... Unlike the PRC, USA is a more or less open society — want someone's secret? Just send your man there; Want to influence someone? Just ask......

I totally don't understand American concern with technology being used by espionage, while it lets this go.

You're thinking too small.

Yes, stealing individual secrets is best done with old school tradecraft. Spies in suits, photos of scandals with dominatrixes.

But what if you want build a system which can identify homosexuals based on textual conversations? You buy Grindr.

Or what if you want to get a backdoor for future exploitation on almost every computer in the US? You buy Fortnite. Because one of those computers will belong to the child of someone important. It only takes one slip by them to get Stuxnet from their home PC to their work PC.

You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling.

You don't need to buy a company to use its systems in an attack. The odds of discovery and disclosure ahead of time increase massively if you go through a major company's decision making processs as part of your hacking process. Companies are people. Lots of them. They are consequently not good at keeping secrets, particularly "I'm hacking the world for evil" secrets.

Ah yes, brave and valiant humans who took 12 years to blow the whistle on PRISM.

I shouldn't have mentioned attack vectors, the first case is the better opportunity these days. Data data data.

> Yes, stealing individual secrets is best done with old school tradecraft. Spies in suits, photos of scandals with dominatrixes.

Why would anybody need to do more than steal individual secrets they've been told to recon?

Because you can't build a homosexual scoring model for the social credit system by learning that one person is secretly gay.

You can build that model if you have access to the data of 20 million people.

Even easier / party not connected to the above hacks the anti-cheat software. No need to buy the company. Probably already has happened.

But also easy to revoke. If you own the code, you don't have to let anyone know what you're sneaking in.

If for example they also owned battlEye they would have a seat at the table to 'suggest' that was used for anti cheating.

No comment on the wider claims, but 40% does give them a tremendous amount of at least soft power.

Sure, but then the problem would be their ownership of the anti-cheat company, not of Epic. FWIW, BattlEye appears to be German and Easy Anti-Cheat Finnish (and bought by Epic).

That's not how covert operations works. More likely is just a series of subtle moves to get "trusted" assets into the right places, followed by coordination outside of corporate channels to implement the backdoor. You'd have trusted agents actually implementing and using the backdoor, and less trusted assets (ideally, to allay suspicion, people not of your nationality that you've leveraged via MICE or some other mechanism) to look the other way and generally act like useful idiots.

Not to mention that some games are translated for the Chinese/asian market. Guess who will suggest a company for that? Then one could slowly make it so that the translation team needs more and more access rights to the deployment platform (or just stealing credentials is an option too - especially from the inside). All you need is to be able to insert a little script and be able to press the "deploy now" button. Hidden backdoors are so '90... Online games are perfect cybernukes.

They also own Riot Games, Grinding Gear Games and Supercell.

Sent me into a small panic there. But I remembered I've got work and play on separate OSes, on separate encrypted disks.

Still in the same system and network I assume. If you are an "irrelevant" target let's say, one where there are no stakes in getting to you, this is good enough. Otherwise it's a matter of getting into your UEFI or disk firmware (since both disk share the same system), or rest of the network (router, IoT crap, another system, etc.) and the fact that you have an encrypted disk won't matter that much.

It's about how important a target you are. You only have to make one mistake, and "they" only have to get it right once. There's no defense that you can put up against a team of dedicated hackers with nation state backing unless you are either not on their radar, or have nothing inherently hackable in your life.

A dedicated team? Of course not.

But it's still worthwhile to protect oneself from being an easy target for a system which just scoops anything interesting off the disk it's installed on.

I dual boot windows and Linux, work is always done on Linux with FDE and I never access files on one from the other but it's a threat model I never considered, Fortnite is installed because the boy plays if a lot when I'm not using the gaming/dev PC.

Until some anti-malware outfit figures it out, then they're in some very hot water.

I think the concept that Tencent is asking Epic to infect your computer with malware is a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

I work for a western studio for which Tencent is a majority shareholder, and I can tell you, Tencent hasn't even hinted at wanting any of our data, let harvesting more.

As far as I can tell, their motives are simple and capitalistic. Somewhat ironically, it was all the western potential acquiring companies that had agendas that were very ethically distasteful to us.

Tencent certainly complies with Chinese laws in china, but can you blame it? Wouldn't you comply with the law of your country?

What makes you think something like this would be announced on company wide email?

One or two guys, working on cheat detection might know something, or most likely are just told to ignore whatever, they see.

Like Google's Dragonfly. Or AT&T letting the NSA splice intercepts in the main fiber room.

Ntk only.

intelligence services play the long game. Gradually exert pressure, put friendly management in place, move supporting services to Chinese data centers, etc. Maybe it takes 10 years. They aren’t in any rush.

Click on his profile. He's the CTO of the company.

Even if you're the CTO of a US company that's being infiltrated by a foreign intelligence agency, there are only three possibilities:

* You are a foreign intelligence asset and and any denials on your part are lies.

* You are not a foreign intelligence asset, but you know that strange things are afoot and have informed the FBI. In order to not jeopardize the counterintelligence investigation, you have been instructed to play dumb, and hence, any denials on your part are lies.

* You are not a foreign intelligence asset and you have not noticed the infiltration. In this situation, you're not lying when you deny that anything's going on, you're just ignorant.

Of course, if your company isn't being infiltrated by foreign intelligence, you will also, correctly, deny that the company is being infiltrated. I'm not saying that his company is being infiltrated or compromised; I'm saying that there's virtually zero informational value in someone in his position denying such a thing because no one would ever admit it.

> Tencent certainly complies with Chinese laws in china, but can you blame it? Wouldn't you comply with the law of your country?

Since you've put yourself out here as CTO of a Tencent owned company... I've heard that in China, Fortnite requires a Chinese "real ID" to play. Aka China knows exactly who you are at all times.

They also "punish" you for playing more than 3 hours at a time if you're under 18.

And I can't prove, but assume they also record all conversations (otherwise... What is point of using real id??)

This doesn't sound like something Epic games would want to be associated with if Tencent wasn't a major shareholder. Are you saying you've had no pressure at all to implement similar features and make your games "more friendly to the Chinese market"?

To me it feels just like China buying up slivers of hollywood so nothing critical of the regime makes the big screen

The question is if this chinese id is requirement from gov to enter the market... how many corporations would refuse (EA for example)? Especialy with Fortnite which is sure to be super profitable.

I am not saying Epic/Tencent is good or anything just that you don't need to be partialy owned by chinese company for this to happen. It is financial capitalist decision. Similar to why other companies want to enter china market.

It would be more suspicious if Epic was doing it even when Fortnite woulnt be profitable in china.

Since you mention EA, it appears that they partner with Tencent Games for the FIFA franchise: https://eafifa.qq.com/

> I work for a western studio for which Tencent is a majority shareholder, and I can tell you, Tencent hasn't even hinted at wanting any of our data, let harvesting more.

How would you know if they did? Most employees have zero interactions with their employer's investors.

Because I am the CTO of the company, and because the only interaction Tencent has with our company are during it's board meetings, which I am also a member of.

The only interaction you know about.

I was working for a telco hardware and software manufacturer and I remember when about 15 years ago, I was the QA, who was sent to China with an engineer to implement "a feature" onsite (yes it was a backdoor). Everybody could guessed in my team, why are we were sent there. Also worked at a cinema control software company and we had to implement the same feature.

So yeah, it only take one engineer to implement a feature. (or a bug)

> Everybody could guessed in my team

So pretty widely known.

Yeah, because we did not gave a shit about the NDA we had to sign.

And your CTO didn't know about your trip abroad? Seems highly unlikely.

The CTO of the company probably was not even aware that we were working for the company.

And you could have mentioned that fact in your original post. This just reads like you baited someone into what was a reasonable response. I'm not sure why that'd be necessary so maybe it was entirely unintentional on your part.

Nice comeback :)

The person who asked should have looked at your profile.

Congrats on the recent PS4 release! I’ve been a fan of PoE since closed beta.

It has only been less than a year since then though...

Also hello from NZ :)

Awww, right in his face, that's cruial!

> all the western potential acquiring companies that had agendas that were very ethically distasteful to us.

Interesting, can you elaborate?

I don't want to give examples of specific companies for what I hope are obvious reasons.

But in basically all cases western companies were much more interested in buying us for our users, which they could then subject to whatever their business model is. Selling ads, selling subscriptions, selling data, whatever.

Our companies profit was actually a negative to these western companies since it simply increases the price that they would have to pay to get at the users.

If the country law is aimed to achive 100% surveillance and zero privacy, yes, you can blame it.

Yes, there is a difference between giving all your information by your own free will and the state spying on everything you do.

On the other hand how many knows how much Facebook and Google collects about you and where that information ends up some time later? There was a lot of scifi about the information society and how that could derail in the future, where machines decides if you might commit a crime in the future and take preventative meassures. We are not far away from it now, just takes a few small jumps in the imagination to end up there :-)

> There was a lot of scifi about the information society

More importantly, there is a lot of literature about totalitarianism.