Security News
Chinese ride hailing app DiDi Chuxing was on Sunday removed from local app stores on on grounds that it did not comply with data protection laws. In its notice of its actions the CAC wrote: "The DiDi Travel App has serious violations of laws and regulations in collecting and using personal information."
The United States is comfortably the world's most powerful nation when measured on "Cyber capabilities that make the greatest difference to national power," according to British think tank The International Institute for Strategic Studies. The report says America's "Capability for offensive cyber operations is probably more developed than that of any other country, although its full potential remains largely undemonstrated".
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.