MIAMI (AP) – The cyber attack, just as financial officials from across Latin America descended on Washington to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Inter-American Development Bank.
On September 24, 2019, requests from more than 15,000 Internet addresses across China flooded the bank’s website and occasionally slammed some of it offline. To expose the network, the bank took the drastic step of blocking all traffic from China.
But the attackers persisted, and as officials gathered for a day of conferences with athletes, academics and well-known chefs, the bombing intensified.
Details of the attack, which have not been previously reported, are contained in an internal IDB document reviewed by The Associated Press.
The news of the attack comes as the new president of the bank, Mauricio Claver-Carone, tries to exploit his hawkish view of China from his time in the Trump administration to dominate those in Washington and beyond, while still past years over his politically-charged election.
Claver-Carone, the former director of the National Security Council for Western Hemisphere Affairs, had his first annual meeting of the IDB in Colombia last week since he was elected last fall over the objections of Democrats and some regional governments who complained of breaking the long-standing transgression has. tradition of a Latin American being at the helm.
Claver-Carone, a geopolitical ideologue, does not seem in a hurry to abandon his contempt for the growing influence of Beijing in the backyard of Washington. In stark contrast to his predecessor, Luis Alberto Moreno of Colombia, who eagerly promoted Chinese investment in the region, Claver-Carone recently pushed the possibility of inviting Taiwan, the island democracy established by the Beijing Communist government as part of its territory is claimed.
By limiting China’s influence, Claver-Carone wants to favor Democrats who question his leadership but share his distrust of Beijing. If he succeeds, they can help him deliver the key promise of his unorthodox candidacy: US support for a capital increase, so the bank can help the region recover from a recession caused by the pandemic, the worst in more as a century to be.
There are early signs that he may be making progress. This month, a dual group of five lawmakers led by Senator Bob Menendez, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed legislation authorizing a $ 80 billion capital increase that would increase lending to the Washington-based bank by 60% will increase.
“People have to accept that he won,” said Dan Runde, a former official of the US agency for international development in the George W. Bush administration and an expert on multilateral institutions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. . ‘Those who are not happy have not yet gone through the five stages of sadness. They are stuck somewhere between denial and anger. ”
But Senator Patrick Leahy, the powerful chairman of the Senate Credit Committee, has yet to sign after warning last year that the choice of Claver-Carone, a ‘polarizing American’, to lead the IDB would hurt the case – not help . for a financial boost. There is also an expectation that some in the region who supported Claver-Carone when Trump was in office – such as Brazil and Colombia – would change faithfully to appeal to the new sheriff in the city: President Joe Biden .
“The argument that an underfunded bank is an opportunity for China is very convincing,” said Dan Restrepo, who served in the same role on the National Security Council as Claver-Carone during the Obama administration. “But it does not answer how you adequately fund the bank and with what leadership.”
In terms of cyber disruption, the attack on the IDB was too small to raise concerns outside the bank. According to the digital security firm NETSCOUT, more than ten million similar attacks (DDoS) were spread last year.
But amid the IDB’s gala celebration, it was full of symbolism.
The bash in Washington was hastily organized after the Trump administration convened allies six months earlier to force the cancellation of the IDB meeting in the Chinese city of Chengdu, which a decade after joining the bank, a party for China would be. .
While the US has been trying to derail the meeting for months, China’s refusal of a visa has given a representative of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó the opportunity to act decisively. While the IDB and most of the countries in Latin America recognize Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela, China is a permanent ally of President Nicolás Maduro.
Claver-Carone was the US official who managed the diplomatic disagreement with China at the IDB. As the top official of the White House in Latin America, he was also the architect of ‘America Rising’, a program that sought to limit China’s yields in Latin America, where it ranked the US as the best trading partner. in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
According to the IDB document, traffic to the IDB website increased to more than four times normal levels on September 19, 2019, forcing the main website and publication page offline. Initially, the bank defended itself by blocking individual IP addresses.
But then ‘the attackers turned off tactics and began spreading requests from more than 15,000 IP addresses across China’, according to the internal document. “By Tuesday 24th night, all revenue traffic from China was blocked, a decision that allowed us to get online again.”
Inevitably, the attackers turned again, this time relying on 180,000 IP addresses of countries, including Singapore and Japan. In total, the attack lasted months, but was effectively limited to three weeks when the bank turned to Amazon to build a more robust firewall.
Although there is no indication that the website has been infringed, the downtime has affected our digital presence and has had a negative impact on various communication efforts, the document states. “It has also made explicit our vulnerabilities to third parties, which could potentially make us the target of new attacks and affect the reputation of the IDB brand.”
After all, it is impossible to know who is behind the attack.
While China has some of the world’s most skilled hackers, security experts say that does not necessarily mean that it is behind the attacks. Poorly protected computers can be hijacked and hacked from anywhere in the world and turned into botnets to unleash DDoS attacks.
“A targeted attack of this time has a clear financial or political motive – you do not jog for three weeks,” said Tord Lundstrom, a digital security expert at Qurium, a Swedish non-profit organization. “But determining whether China is behind it, or whether someone is just trying to make it look, is very difficult to determine without additional digital forensic information.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not directly respond to questions about whether the government knew of the incident at the IDB or was involved in it, but said in a statement that it strongly opposed cyber attacks.
“Linking cyber attacks directly to a government is an extremely sensitive political issue,” the ministry said in a statement. “All parties must jointly resolve the burglary problem through dialogue and cooperation and not politicize the issue.”
Claver-Carone declined to be questioned, while the IDB said it did not comment on internal cyber security issues. Nevertheless, three people at the bank told the AP that they remember that in 2019 China openly blamed the attack for discussing the outage. The people spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberation.
On paper, China holds less than 0.004% of the IDB’s voting shares, the smallest stake of any of the bank’s 48 members. But membership was a cheap way for China to expand its reach in Latin America. Chinese companies can bid on IDB-funded projects, rub shoulders with political leaders and take on valuable economic intelligence that is more difficult in itself.
China is also the second-largest non-lending shareholder in IDB Invest, the bank’s private lending arm, with nearly 6% of the shares, thanks to a reorganization in 2015 when the Obama administration refused to increase additional resources and the US interest to see. diluted to 13%.
The IDB also manages a $ 2 billion fund that consists entirely of contributions from China. Over the years, the IDB has also hosted more than a dozen business meetings that have connected Latin American entrepreneurs with Chinese investors.
“For too long, the IDB has been too friendly with the Chinese Communist Party,” Runde said. “The Bank and its shareholders did not hold China accountable when it destroyed the 60th anniversary of the IDB. This too sociable relationship needs to change. ”
China has made no secret of its strained relationship with Claver-Carone. According to a person who attended the meeting on condition of anonymity, Yi Gang, the head of the central bank of China, in a symbolic reprimand refrained from voting during the special meeting last year when Claver-Carone was elected. discussion.
Rebecca Ray, an economist at Boston University who monitors China’s investment in the region, said the gripping policies surrounding China could be a double-edged sword. Although Claver-Carone’s efforts to isolate Beijing may play well in the US Congress and help it obtain additional funding, it could ultimately undermine the IDB’s mission in a time of great need for funding to build infrastructure. , improve health care and poverty in the region.
She noted that since the IDB had brought in other multilateral institutions to obtain more funding, three Latin American countries – Brazil, Ecuador and Uruguay – joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s response to the World Bank and one that US opposes.
“Targeting China could ultimately limit China’s willingness to play an active role, which would not be popular in the region,” Ray said. “As long as the need for financing is still great, countries will still turn to China, because that is where the money is.”
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Associated Press author Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.
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Joshua Goodman on Twitter: @APJoshGoodman
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Contact AP’s global investigation team at [email protected]