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:
- Laptops With More than 3.7 Million Hong Kong Voters’ Data Stolen
March 28, 2017
The Registration and Electoral Office of Hong Kong has reported the disappearance of two laptop computers after the chief executive election. The laptops contained around 3.7 million city’s voters personal information that could be compromised after the one of the most significant, if not the biggest ever data breaches in Hong Kong. The information that was ...
- China’s Quest for Cybersecurity Causes Headache for Foreign Companies
March 18, 2017
“There is no national security without cybersecurity,” declared President Xi Jinping at the inaugural meeting of the Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization in February 2014. His words acted as the starter’s gun for a cyberspace regulation marathon in China. Since then, Chinese authorities have tightened the state’s control over all things cyber: from ...
- Nation States Distancing Themselves from APTs
February 14, 2017
Security researchers say a new trend in privateering is gaining traction among nation states, which are increasingly contracting with private companies to carry out state-sponsored attacks. Typically APT attacks have been the work of internal government spy apparatuses, but outsourcing allows nation states to shift risk, dodge attribution claims and take advantage of more sophisticated APT ...