Security News
China's crackdown on cryptocurrencies has reached a new crescendo, with the nation's Ministry of Public Security on Wednesday proclaiming it has arrested over 1000 people and shut down 170 gangs that provided crypto-linked money-laundering services. Others are what China calls "Two cards" scammers, who funnel their ill-gotten gains to acquire phone cards that are shipped outside China, then use call credit stored in the cards to make scam calls back into the Middle Kingdom.
The Uyghur community located in China and Pakistan has been the subject of an ongoing espionage campaign aiming to trick the targets into downloading a Windows backdoor to amass sensitive information from their systems. The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic minority group originating from Central and East Asia and are recognized as native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China.
A former governor of the People's Bank of China has given a speech in which he suggested that China's Digital Yuan is not intended to increase China's influence over global financial systems. An unauthorised translation of the speech by Chinese journalist Zichen Wang reports that Zhou said China's digital currency "Is mainly targeted on the modernization of the domestic payment system, keeping pace with the digital economy and the Internet era, improving efficiency, and reducing costs, especially for the retail payment system".
Good investigative reporting on how Apple is participating in and assisting with Chinese censorship and surveillance.
China has signalled that ride-sharing companies and laid out regulations that will stop cars from collecting unnecessary data. State-controlled media report that authorities hauled in ten major ride-sharing outfits last week, among them DiDi and Meituan, and gave them a stern talking-to about how much they pay to drivers.
In 2019, a Chinese security researcher working with the internet security and antivirus company Qihoo 360 unveiled an intricately woven exploit: One that would allegedly let a remote attacker easily jailbreak an iPhone X iOS 12.1. Allegedly shows, a successful exploit would allow a remote attacker to jailbreak an iPhoneX, with the targeted user none the wiser, allowing the intruder to gain access to a victim's data, processing power and more.
GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming on Friday delivered the 2021 Vincent Briscoe Lecture for the Institute for Security, Science and Technology, and opened with an observation that humans love to connect to each other, that digital connectivity continues to become more pervasive and important, and that Britain is "a big animal in the digital world." China's size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system.
Dozens of defense companies, government agencies, and financial organizations in America and abroad appear to have been compromised by China via vulnerabilities in their Pulse Connect Secure VPN appliances - including a zero-day flaw that won't be patched until next month. On Tuesday, IT software supplier Ivanti, the parent of Pulse Secure, issued a wake-up call to its customers by revealing it looks as though select clients were compromised via their encrypted gateways.
America's plan to compete with China includes a call for the land of the free to dominate tech standards bodies, especially for 5G, and to appoint an ambassador level official to lead a new "Technology Partnership Office" that Washington will use to drive tech collaboration among like-minded nations. Released last Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and expected to have bipartisan support, the draft Strategic Competition Act of 2021 offers 281 pages of policy aimed at "Ensuring the United States is postured to compete with China for decades to come," in the words of ranking member US Senator Jim Risch.
The highest-ranked officer in India's armed forces has admitted that China has cyber-war capabilities that can overwhelm his nation's defenses and suggested that only cross-forces collaboration will get India to parity with its giant neighbor. General Bipin Rawat, a four-star general and since 2020 the first to hold a new role of chief of defense staff, offered that assessment yesterday in a talk hosted by Indian think tank the Vivekananda International Foundation.