At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Read more…
Source: Reuters
Related:
- Dozens of malicious wallpapers found on Steam Workshop
June 16, 2026
Since late 2025, malware has been spreading rapidly through the Steam Workshop, the gaming platform’s built-in service for players to create and share custom content. The attackers are primarily targeting gamers in China and Russia, aiming to hijack their accounts. To pull this off, they are exploiting Wallpaper Engine – a popular live wallpaper app ...
- Public and Private Medical Community Targeted by China-Nexus Threat Actor
June 15, 2026
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a sophisticated campaign attributed to UNC6508, a People’s Republic of China (PRC)-nexus threat actor, targeting institutions in the North American academic, medical, and military research community. While remaining undetected for over a year, the threat actor compromised externally facing web applications, deployed bespoke malware, pivoted to sensitive internal ...
- Chinese spies use LinkedIn to target UK officials and military staff
June 3, 2026
Chinese spies are targeting UK government and military staff on job websites including LinkedIn to try to get access to classified or sensitive information, MI5 has warned. A bulletin has been released by the Five Eyes powers – the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – highlighting an “aggressive” online recruitment strategy where spies for Beijing military ...
- Inside Shadow-Earth-053: A China-Aligned Cyberespionage Campaign Against Government and Defense Sectors in Asia
April 30, 2026
Through ongoing analysis of ShadowPad implants targeting South and Southeast Asia, TrendAI Research has uncovered a series of new related campaigns that are tracked under a temporary intrusion set (a provisional cluster of related activity pending formal attribution) designated SHADOW-EARTH-053, which we assess to be aligned with China’s broader strategic interests. Trend Micro telemetry indicates that ...
- 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 ...