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:
- Governments issue alerts after ‘sophisticated’ state-backed actor found exploiting flaws in Cisco security boxes
April 25, 2024
A previously unknown and “sophisticated” nation-state group compromised Cisco firewalls as early as November 2023 for espionage purposes — and possibly attacked network devices made by other vendors including Microsoft, according to warnings from the networking giant and three Western governments. A Cisco spokesperson declined to comment on which country the snooping crew – tracked as ...
- Almost every Chinese keyboard app has a security flaw that reveals what users type
April 24, 2024
Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state ...
- Thousands of LG TVs are vulnerable to takeover
April 9, 2024
As many as 91,000 LG TVs face the risk of being commandeered unless they receive a just-released security update patching four critical vulnerabilities discovered late last year. The vulnerabilities are found in four LG TV models that collectively comprise slightly more than 88,000 units around the world, according to results returned by the Shodan search engine ...
- Why the threat of a ‘nightmare’ Chinese supercomputer just got a step closer
April 4, 2024
A cyber security official at the US State Department had noticed something unusual. An internal IT security system, nicknamed “Big Yellow Taxi”, had flagged unusual activity on its corporate Microsoft account. The tech team quickly raised its concerns to Microsoft, hopeful that the alert was just a false positive. What rapidly emerged, however, was that a ...
- Chinese hackers targeted UK’s Electoral Commission and politicians, say security services
March 25, 2024
Chinese state-backed hackers were responsible for two “malicious” digital campaigns targeting the UK’s democratic institutions and politicians, the security services have found. The UK holds China responsible for a prolonged cyber-attack on the Electoral Commission during which Beijing allegedly accessed the personal details of about 40 million voters. Two individuals and a front company linked to ...
- Bringing Access Back — Initial Access Brokers Exploit F5 BIG-IP (CVE-2023-46747) and ScreenConnect
March 21, 2024
During the course of an intrusion investigation in late October 2023, Mandiant observed novel N-day exploitation of CVE-2023-46747 affecting F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface. Additionally, in February 2024, Mandiant researchers observed exploitation of Connectwise ScreenConnect CVE-2024-1709 by the same actor. This mix of custom tooling and the SUPERSHELL framework leveraged in these incidents is assessed ...