MIAMI (AP) – The cyber attack peaked at a time when financial officials from across Latin America were heading to Washington to celebrate the Inter-American Development Bank’s 60th anniversary.
On September 24, 2019, requests from more than 15,000 Internet addresses across China flooded the bank’s website, taking part of it offline intermittently. To unblock the network, the bank took the drastic step to block all traffic from China.
But the attackers persisted, and as authorities gathered for a day of conferences with famous athletes, academics and chefs, the bombing intensified.
The details of the attack, which were not previously reported, are contained in an internal IDB document reviewed by The Associated Press.
News of the attack is surfacing as the bank’s new president, Mauricio Claver-Carone, seeks to leverage his aggressive views on China from his time in the Trump administration to overcome those in Washington and beyond, still furious at his politically charged election in the last year.
Claver-Carone, the former senior director of the National Security Council for Western Hemisphere Affairs, chaired last week in Colombia his first annual IDB meeting since he was elected last fall, despite objections from Democrats and some regional governments that complained that he was breaking the old tradition of a Latin American at the helm.
A geopolitical ideologue, Claver-Carone appears to be in no hurry to abandon his disdain for Beijing’s growing influence in Washington’s backyard. In sharp contrast to his predecessor, Luis Alberto Moreno of Colombia, who eagerly promoted Chinese investment in the region, Claver-Carone recently considered inviting Taiwan, the democracy island claimed by Beijing’s communist government as part of its territory.
By restricting China’s influence, Claver-Carone is trying to get favors from Democrats who question his leadership but share his distrust in Beijing. If he succeeds, they can help him deliver on what was the main promise of his unorthodox candidacy: US support for a capital increase so the bank can help the region out of a pandemic-induced recession. which is the worst in over a century.
There are early signs that he may be making some progress. This month, a bipartisan 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 loans by the Washington-based bank by 60% .
“People need to accept that he won,” said Dan Runde, a former employee of the United States Agency for International Development under 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 mourning. They are caught somewhere between denial and anger. “
But Senator Patrick Leahy, the powerful chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has yet to sign after warning last year that the choice of Claver-Carone, a “polarizing American”, to lead the IDB would undermine – would not help – the case for an increase in funding. There is also an expectation that some in the region who supported Claver-Carone when Trump was in office – such as Brazil and Colombia – may change alliance 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 played the same role as Claver-Carone on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “But it does not answer how you finance the bank properly and with what leadership.”
As far as cyber disruptions are concerned, the attack on the IDB was too small to generate concern beyond the bank. Last year, more than 10 million similar distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were observed worldwide, according to the digital security company NETSCOUT.
But taking place in the midst of the IDB’s gala celebration, it was full of symbolism.
The party in Washington was hastily organized after the Trump administration, six months earlier, brought together allies to force the cancellation of the IDB meeting in the Chinese city of Chengdu, which would be a kind of party for China a decade after joining the bank. . .
While the United States had been trying to derail the meeting for months, China’s denial of a visa to a representative of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó gave it the opportunity to act decisively. While the IDB and most Latin American nations recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, China is a faithful ally of President Nicolás Maduro
Claver-Carone was the American official who led the diplomatic standoff with China at the IDB. As a senior White House official for Latin America, he was also the architect of “America Rising”, a program that sought to contain the forays made by China in Latin America, where he overthrew the United States as the main trading partner in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
According to the IDB document, on September 19, 2019, traffic to the IDB website increased to more than four times normal levels, forcing the main website and the publications page down. At first, the bank defended itself by blocking individual IP addresses.
But then “the attackers changed tactics and started sending requests for more than 15,000 IP addresses spread across China,” according to the internal document. “On Tuesday, the 24th, all of China’s revenue traffic was blocked, a decision that allowed us to go back online.”
Impulsive, the attackers spun again, this time relying on 180,000 IP addresses from countries like Singapore and Japan. Altogether, the attack lasted for months, but was effectively contained after three weeks, when the bank turned to Amazon to build a more robust firewall .
Although there is no indication that the site has been breached, “downtime has affected our digital presence and has had a negative impact on different communication efforts,” the document said. “It also made our vulnerabilities explicit to third parties, which could make us the target of new attacks and impact the IDB’s brand reputation.”
Still, it is impossible to know who was behind the attack.
Although China has some of the most skilled hackers in the world, security experts say that this does not necessarily mean that it is behind the attacks. Poorly protected computers can be hijacked and packaged from anywhere in the world and turned into botnets to trigger DDoS attacks.
“A targeted attack of this duration has an obvious financial or political reason – you don’t go trolling for three weeks,” said Tord Lundstrom, a digital security expert at Qurium, a Swedish non-profit organization. “But determining whether China is behind this, or whether someone is just trying to make it look like it, is very difficult to determine without additional digital forensic information.”
China’s Foreign Ministry did not directly answer questions about whether the government knew of the IDB incident or was involved, but said in a statement that it strongly opposed cyber attacks
“Linking cyber attacks directly to a government is a highly sensitive political issue,” said the ministry’s statement. “All parties must jointly resolve the issue of hacking through dialogue and cooperation and avoid politicizing the issue.”
Claver-Carone declined to be interviewed, while the IDB said it did not comment on internal cybersecurity issues. However, three people at the bank told the AP that they remember China being openly guilty of the attack at briefings in 2019 to discuss the consequences. People spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
On paper, China has a tiny 0.004% of the IDB’s voting shares, the smallest share of any of the bank’s 48 members. But membership has been a cheap way for China to expand its reach in Latin America. Chinese companies can compete on IDB-financed projects, socialize with political leaders and obtain valuable economic information that would be more difficult to acquire on their own.
China is also the second largest non-borrowing shareholder of IDB Invest, the bank’s private lending arm, with almost 6% of the shares, thanks to a reorganization in 2015, when the Obama administration refused to disburse additional resources and saw the US share diluted to 13%.
The IDB also manages a $ 2 billion fund composed entirely of contributions from China. Over the years, the IDB has also organized more than a dozen business summits connecting Latin American entrepreneurs to Chinese investors.
“For a long time, the IDB has been too friendly with the Chinese Communist Party,” said Runde. “The Bank and its shareholders did not hold China accountable when it ruined the IDB’s 60th anniversary. This very cozy relationship has to change. “
China did not hide its tense relationship with Claver-Carone. In a symbolic rebuke, Yi Gang, the head of China’s central bank, abstained from voting at last year’s special meeting when Claver-Carone was elected, according to a person who attended the meeting on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed door discussion.
Rebecca Ray, an economist at Boston University who tracks China’s investments in the region, said the delicate policy around China could be a double-edged sword. While Claver-Carone’s attempts to isolate Beijing may perform well in the US Congress and help him obtain additional funding, this could end up undermining the IDB’s mission at a time of great need for financing to build infrastructure, improve health and reduce poverty in the region.
She noted that, as the IDB has delayed other multilateral institutions in obtaining more funding, three Latin American countries – Brazil, Ecuador and Uruguay – have joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s response to the World Bank and to which the US oppose.
“Putting China aside can end up limiting China’s willingness to continue playing an active role, which would not be popular in the region,” said Ray. “As long as the need for financing remains high, countries will continue to turn to China, because that’s where the money is. ”
___
Associated Press editor Joe McDonald of Beijing contributed to this report.
__
Joshua Goodman on Twitter: @APJoshGoodman
___
Contact the AP global investigative team at [email protected]