Cybersecurity & Espionage Articles
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-09-15/china-wanted-ge-s-secrets-but-then-their-spy-got-caught
In January 2014, Arthur Gau, an aerospace engineer who was nearing retirement age, received an unexpected email from a long-lost acquaintance in China. Years before, Gau had made a series of trips from his home in Phoenix to speak at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or NUAA, one of China’s most prestigious research institutions. The original invitation had come from the head of a lab there studying helicopter design. Increasingly, however, Gau had heard from someone else, a man who worked at the university in a vague administrative capacity. Little Zha, as the man called himself, was the one who made sure Gau never had to pay his own airfare when he came to give talks. When Gau brought his mother on a 2003 visit, Zha arranged and paid for them to take a Yangtze cruise to see the river’s dramatically sculpted middle reaches before they were flooded by the Three Gorges Dam.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/opinion/international-world/china-espionage.html
In my three-decade career with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, China was never seen as a major threat. If we lost sleep at night, it was over more immediate challenges such as Soviet expansionism and transnational terrorism. China’s halting emergence from the chaotic Mao Zedong era and its international isolation after Chinese soldiers crushed pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989 made it seem like an insular backwater. It’s a different picture today. China has acquired global economic and diplomatic influence, enabling covert operations that extend well beyond traditional intelligence gathering, are growing in scale and threaten to overwhelm Western security agencies. The U.S. and British intelligence chiefs — the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, and the MI5 director general, Ken McCallum — signaled rising concern over this with an unprecedented joint news conference in July to warn of, as Mr. Wray put it, a “breathtaking” Chinese effort to steal technology and economic intelligence and to influence foreign politics in Beijing’s favor. The pace was quickening, they said, with the number of MI5 investigations into suspected Chinese activity having increased sevenfold since 2018. https://www.reuters.com/legal/twitter-whistleblower-detail-dire-security-threats-ahead-musk-deal-vote-2022-09-13/
The FBI informed Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) of at least one Chinese agent working at the company, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley said during a Senate hearing on Tuesday where a whistleblower testified, raising new concerns about foreign meddling at the influential social media platform. Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a famed hacker who served as Twitter's head of security until his firing in January, said some Twitter employees were concerned the Chinese government would be able to collect data on the company's users. Twitter has come under fire previously for lax security, most notably in 2020 when teenage hackers seized control of dozens of high-profile accounts, including the verified profile of former U.S. President Barack Obama. On Tuesday, Zatko's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed Twitter's security issues could be far more serious, alleging for the first time that the company was informed of agents of the Chinese government working at the social media firm. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/07/1059067/chinese-spacex-engineers-linkedin-scam/
If you were just looking at his LinkedIn page, you’d certainly think Mai Linzheng was a top-notch engineer. With a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua, China’s top university, and a master’s degree in semiconductor manufacturing from UCLA, Mai began his career at Intel and KBR, a space tech company, before ending up at SpaceX in 2013. Having spent the past eight years and nine months working in the human race to space, he’s now a senior technician. Except all is not as it seems. Upon closer inspection, there are plenty of red flags: Despite having been in the US for 18 years, Mai has written all his job titles, degrees, and company locations in Chinese. His bachelor's degree is in business management, even though his alma mater, Tsinghua, only offers that degree to student athletes, and Mai was not one. Besides, the man in his profile photo looks younger than Mai’s stated age. The image, as it turns out, was stolen from Korean influencer Yang In-mo's Instagram. In fact, none of the information on this page is true. The profile of “Mai Linzheng” is actually one of the millions of fraudulent pages set up on LinkedIn to lure users into scams, often involving cryptocurrency investments and targeting people of Chinese descent all over the world. Scammers like Mai claim affiliation with prestigious schools and companies to boost their credibility before connecting with other users, building a relationship, and laying a financial trap. |
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November 2022
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