China’s Ministry of State Security revealed on Wednesday that foreign intelligence agencies are using crowdsourcing to gather sensitive data in China, posing a covert but serious threat to national security.
This covert method, dubbed “crowdsourced espionage,” poses an escalating threat. Foreign intelligence agencies break down intelligence-gathering missions into smaller, discrete tasks and distribute them via legitimate crowdsourcing platforms. Unwitting participants are recruited to carry out seemingly harmless data collection tasks, often unaware of the true intent behind their assignments. These individual data points are then analyzed and pieced together, enabling the agencies to acquire sensitive information.
Read more…
Source: Global Times News
Related:
- Chinese engineer stole US military and NASA software for years
April 28, 2026
International espionage isn’t always about sophisticated malware and zero-day bugs. Sometimes it’s as simple as pretending to be someone else asking for a favor. For four years, a Chinese aerospace engineer did just that. Dozens of researchers at NASA, the US military, and major universities handed him exactly what he asked for, and possibly violated US ...
- U.S. DOJ: Prolific Chinese state-sponsored contract hacker extradited from Italy
April 27, 2026
Xu Zewei (徐泽伟), 34, of the People’s Republic of China was extradited to the United States this weekend and appeared today in U.S. District Court in Houston on a nine-count indictment related to his involvement in computer intrusions between February 2020 and June 2021. Certain of those computer intrusions allegedly are part of the HAFNIUM computer ...
- Stolen medical data from 500,000 UK volunteers advertised for sale on a Chinese website
April 23, 2026
Health information belonging to 500,000 people in the United Kingdom has been stolen and offered for sale on the Chinese website Alibaba, the UK’s technology minister Ian Murray has confirmed. The medical data comes from participants of UK Biobank, the world’s most comprehensive dataset of biological, health, and lifestyle information, compiled from volunteers and used by ...
- UK: Military reviews Army’s use of Chinese technology to make weapons
April 18, 2026
The Defence Secretary has ordered an investigation after The Telegraph revealed that the British Army was using Chinese 3D printers to build weapons. Last year, it was revealed that British troops were taking the technology with them into the field and using it to make “suicide drones” for attack missions, despite national security concerns. Army officers said ...
- Sophisticated supply chain attack exploited TrueConf update process
April 2, 2026
Southeast Asian governments were recently targeted by a highly sophisticated supply chain attack as part of a wider cyber-espionage campaign, which experts believe is the work of the Chinese government. Security researchers Check Point detailed their findings on Operation TrueChaos, a campaign revolving around a zero-day vulnerability in TrueConf, a video conferencing and collaboration platform which ...
- Coruna: the framework used in Operation Triangulation
March 26, 2026
On March 4, 2026, Google and iVerify published reports about a highly sophisticated exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone devices. According to Google, the exploit kit was first discovered in targeted attacks conducted by a customer of an unnamed surveillance vendor. It was later used by other attackers in watering-hole attacks in Ukraine and in financially motivated ...