Everything Changed when the Netherlands Attacked

Apr 09, 2025

Welcome to Memetic Warfare.

The CVERC is back at it again with a new report blaming the US and interestingly enough Singapore for “cyber attacks” against the Harbin Winter Games. The cover image is a solid 10/10 as far as I’m concerned.

The executive summary is below:

The US, Netherlands and Singapore are named as the main perpetrators of these alleged “cyber attacks”, which “failed to have a serious impact on the event”. The report then gets specific, claiming that there were over 270,167 attacks - a ridiculous number.

This insane in the membrane number makes sense when you realize that they include things like port scanning. They seemingly haven’t gotten the memo that “port scanning isn’t a crime”.

I’m not even sure what to make of the specific explanation:

The attribution is of course done incredibly poorly and in a fashion seemingly meant to mislead - referring to IP addresses originating in the US or the Netherlands only and not accounting for proxy/VPN services.

From here we have the conclusion:

So, some notes. Firstly, the CVERC is showing an increased operational tempo, putting out shorter reports on a more regular basis it seems. Additionally, the report is almost entirely bereft of technical details in contrast to previous reporting and is overtly unfounded and odd.

Emphasizing Singapore is an interesting choice. They’ve had some takedowns of Chinese and even Russian networks, but haven’t overly publicized or named and shamed the actors. I wonder if this is a a response to those takedowns or part of a different gambit. The Netherlands for example is mentioned as a probable case of the alleged US attacks using proxies, but not the case of Singapore.

Domestically this is important also as it makes China look good and technically competent, though I haven’t checked regarding domestic amplification.

But wait, there’s more!

There are other Chinese organizations playing a role in the broader mosaic that is China’s external propaganda and influence apparatus, as shown by an additional recent report.

In what appears to be a response to Salt Typhoon, the “China Cybersecurity Industry Alliance” has released a new “report” on alleged US “cyberattacks” on mobile devices. A lot of quotations, but long-time readers will know that this is par for the course for these reports.

Not much interesting here beyond the usual- blaming the US for things it definitely does (as does every state) but in a super roundabout and inaccurate/misleading way to deflect blame.

Nice to see that the use of purported CTI reporting is still a thing for China, and I’m looking forward to seeing the next association or center that they come up with.

We’ll also take a quick look this week at Lithuania’s threat assessment, available here.

We have some more coverage of the recruitment via messaging applications for sabotage/espionage and so on, this is a big thing that isn’t going to go away.