Chinese state-sponsored hackers breached TeamViewer in 2016

The German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed that the software company behind TeamViewer was compromised in 2016 by Chinese hackers. According to the media outlet, Chinese state-sponsored hackers used the Winnti trojan malware to infect the systems of the Company.

The Winnti group was first spotted by Kaspersky in 2013, according to the researchersthe gang has been active since 2007. The gang is financially-motivated and was mostly involved in cyber espionage campaigns. The hackers were known for targeting companies in theonline gaming industry, the majority of the victims is located in Southeast Asia.

China’s APT10

You’ve decided to tackle a high-end luxury apartment, the kind of building with multiple Picassos in the penthouse. You could spend weeks or months casing the place, studying every resident’s schedule, analyzing the locks on all the doors. You could dig through trash for hints about which units have alarms, run through every permutation of what the codes might be.

Or you could also just steal the super’s keys. According to a Justice Department indictment Thursday, that is effectively what China has done to the rest of the world since 2014. That’s when the country’s elite APT10—short for “advanced persistent threat”—hacking group decided to target not just individual companies in its long-standing efforts to steal intellectual property, but instead focus on so-called managed service providers.

China has been ‘hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries’

A Chinese state-owned telecommunications company has been ‘hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries,’ according to an academic paper published this week by researchers from the US Naval War College and Tel Aviv University. The culprit is China Telecom, the country’s third-largest telco and internet service provider (ISP), which has had a presence inside North American networks since the early 2000s when it created its first point-of-presence (PoP). PoPs are data centers that do nothing more than re-route traffic between all the smaller networks that make up the larger internet.

How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Google’s prototype Chinese search engine reportedly links searches to phone numbers

Google is reportedly building a prototype system that would tie Chinese users’ Google searches to their personal phone numbers, as part of a new search service that would comply with the Chinese government’s censorship requirements. The Intercept writes that the “Dragonfly” Android app, a secret project revealed by a whistleblower last month, could be linked to a user’s phone number — making it simple to track individual users’ searches. This tracking would be in addition to Dragonfly’s blacklisting of terms like “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize,” which might normally pull up news about Chinese activist and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.

Chinese hackers ‘steal US navy data on undersea warfare and supersonic missiles’

China’s state hackers have reportedly stolen a large amount of highly-sensitive US navy data on its undersea warfare, including plans for supersonic anti-ship missiles on submarines. Government experts were said to have compromised the computers of a US navy contractor, giving them access to the information, according to the Washington Post, citing unnamed American officials. They said – on the condition of anonymity about an ongoing investigation – that the security breaches were believed to have taken place in January and February.

China is exporting facial recognition software to Africa

For all the promise it holds for the future, artificial intelligence is still guilty of historic bias. Voice recognition software struggles with English accents that are not American or British and facial recognition can be guilty of racial profiling. As this technology increasingly outpaces human discourse on race, China seems to be getting ahead on recognizing a diverse range of faces across the wider world, despite its own struggles with racial insensitivity.

Researchers link a decade of potent hacks to Chinese intelligence group

Researchers said Chinese intelligence officers are behind almost a decade’s worth of network intrusions that use advanced malware to penetrate software and gaming companies in the US, Europe, Russia, and elsewhere. The hackers have struck as recently as March in a campaign that used phishing emails in an attempt to access corporate-sensitive Office 365 and Gmail accounts. In the process, they made serious operational security errors that revealed key information about their targets and possible location.

How China Is Buying Its Way into Europe

For more than a decade, Chinese political and corporate leaders have been scouring the globe with seemingly bottomless walletsin hand. From Asia to Africa, the U.S. and Latin America, the results are hard to ignore as China has asserted itself as an emerging world power. Less well known is China’s diffuse but expanding footprint in Europe.

Source: bloomberg.com

China forces spyware onto Muslim’s Android phones, complete with security holes

JingWang (“clean internet” in Chinese) doesn’t just block access to specific websites. It also searches your Android phone for “illegal” images, audio recordings, and videos, and can upload them to an external server – alongside identifying details of your phone such as its IMEI number, model, phone number, and manufacturer.

Source: bitdefender.com

Chinese Government Forces Residents To Install Surveillance App With Awful Security

In Xinjiang, a part of western China that a Muslim minority population calls home, the government forces residents to install an Android app that scans devices for particular files. Now, cybersecurity researchers have found that the so-called JingWang app has horrendous security practices for transferring data, and uncovered more details on what exactly the app does to phones.

Source: vice.com

When China hoards its hackers everyone loses

It’s a worrying development in the direction of isolationism and away from the benefits of competition in the spirit of improving security for all. It comes at a time when relations between the US and China strain under the weight of Huawei security concerns, which are not at all new, but are certainly coming to a head as American companies sever business ties with the firm.

China-Linked APT15 Used Myriad of New Tools To Hack UK Government Contractor

According to researchers, theAPT15 group was able to deploy three backdoors – identified as RoyalCli, RoyalDNS andBS2005 – on an unnamed UK contractor’s systems. These backdoors helped the threat actor collect data related to the UK government’s military technology. The networks were compromised from May 2016 until late 2017 and infected over 30 contractor controlled hosts,said the NCC Group, whichfirst revealed its report on the attack at Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit last week.

China Presses Its Internet Censorship Efforts Across the Globe

Within its digital borders, China has long censored what its people read and say online. Now, it is increasingly going beyond its own online realms to police what people and companies are saying about it all over the world.

Source: nytimes.com

The Rising Tide of China’s Human Intelligence

On Jan. 15, FBI agents arrested Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA case officer, and charged him with unlawful retention of classified information. Lee is the sixth person charged by the Justice Department in the past two years for espionage-related offenses suspected to have been conducted on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. By comparison, prior to 2015, only one or two people on average per year were arrested for such offenses.

China using big data to detain people before crime is committed

If the system flags anything suspicious – a large purchase of fertilizer, perhaps, or stockpiles of food considered a marker of terrorism – it notifies police, who are expected to respond the same day and act according to what they find. ‘Who ought to be taken, should be taken,’ says a work report located by the rights organization.

Source: theglobeandmail.com

China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping

China censored the letter N from its internet for at least a day. The ban came as China cracked down on online discussion over the Chinese Communist Party’s proposal to scrap presidential term limits. Abolishing term limits would allow President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely.

It’s not entirely clear why the government targeted N, but we have a few theories.