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:
- Hackers are turning to RTF template injections technique to install malware on PCs
December 2, 2021
Nation state-backed hacking groups are exploiting a simple but effective new technique to power phishing campaigns for spreading malware and stealing information that’s of interest to their governments. Cybersecurity researchers at Proofpoint say advanced persistent threat (APT) groups working on behalf of Russian, Chinese and Indian interests are using rich text format (RTF) template injections. While the ...
- UK spy chief warns China, Russia racing to master AI
November 30, 2021
The chief of the United Kingdom’s foreign spy service is to warn that China and Russia are racing to master artificial intelligence in a way that could revolutionise geopolitics over the next 10 years. Richard Moore, who heads the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, is due to make his first public speech since becoming chief ...
- Russian ransomware gangs start collaborating with Chinese hackers
November 17, 2021
There’s some unusual activity brewing on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums, where hackers appear to be reaching out to Chinese counterparts for collaboration. These attempts to enlist Chinese threat actors are mainly seen on the RAMP hacking forum, which is encouraging Mandarin-speaking actors to participate in conversations, share tips, and collaborate on attacks. According to a new report by ...
- Mac Zero Day Targets Apple Devices in Hong Kong
November 12, 2021
Since at least late August, attackers have been using flaws in macOS and iOS – including in-the-wild use of what was then a zero-day flaw – to install a backdoor on the Apple devices of users who visited Hong Kong-based media and pro-democracy sites. This isn’t a finely targeted campaign, but it’s a sophisticated one. The ...
- Warehouse belonging to Chinese payment terminal manufacturer raided by FBI
October 27, 2021
US feds were spotted raiding a warehouse belonging to Chinese payment terminal manufacturer PAX Technology in Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday, with speculation abounding that the machines contained preinstalled malware. PAX Technology is headquartered in Shenzhen, China, and is one of the largest electronic payment providers in the world. It operates around 60 million point-of-sale (PoS) payment ...
- MysterySnail attacks IT companies, defence contractors and diplomatic entities with Windows zero-day
October 12, 2021
In late August and early September 2021, Kaspersky technologies detected attacks with the use of an elevation of privilege exploit on multiple Microsoft Windows servers. The exploit had numerous debug strings from an older, publicly known exploit for vulnerability CVE-2016-3309, but closer analysis revealed that it was a zero-day. We discovered that it was using ...