BEIJING—China is using a widely downloaded mobile app and a translation service to hoover up billions of pieces of data inside its borders and around the world, according to reports published in recent days by researchers in Australia and Germany.
While policy makers in the West have trained their focus on China’s advances in next-generation cellular technology and invasive cyber-surveillance capabilities, the new research suggests that Beijing has broadened its mass-data-collection efforts to include relatively innocuous technologies, such as language translation.
A Chinese propaganda app that has been likened to a digital-age “Little Red Book” of Chairman Mao’s quotations and that has racked up more than 100 million registered users provides a potential backdoor for the Chinese Communist Party to log users’ locations, calls and contact lists, according to a report published Saturday by German cybersecurity company Cure53. The report was commissioned by the Open Technology Fund of U.S.-financed Radio Free Asia.
The report focuses only on devices operating on the Android operating system, which underpins the vast majority of China’s smartphones. The app is also available...
WASHINGTON—The U.S. added 28 Chinese entities to an export blacklist Monday, citing their role in Beijing’s repression of Muslim minorities in northwest China, just days before high-level trade talks are set to resume in Washington.
The action, which the U.S. said wasn’t related to trade talks, was nonetheless likely to disturb Chinese officials already incensed over what Beijing sees as U.S. support for an increasingly disruptive pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
“I think the Chinese are probably going to see a connection, even if the administration says there isn’t one,” said Matthew Goodman, senior adviser for Asian economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “It’s going to complicate the discussions this week…the timing is going to be awkward for the Chinese.”
The newly identified entities “have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and...
A new report claims the cost of replacing Huawei and ZTE equipment in Europe’s networks is considerably lower than generally assumed.
Soon to be published by Strand Consult, the report is titled “The real cost to rip and replace of Chinese equipment in telecom networks.” It seems to have been written, at least in part, in response to analysis produced by the GSMA, which estimates a ban on Chinese gear would add $62 billion to the cost of European 5G networks and set them back by a year and a half.
The Strand report claims that cost is far lower, putting the cost of replacing Huawei equipment at just $3.5 billion, or around seven bucks per subscriber. The reason for this massive discrepancy is two-fold. Firstly Strand says around half of the GSMA figure is an extrapolation of the broader cost of delaying 5G and secondly it insists that 70-80% of existing RAN equipment is due to be replaced anyway, so should be discounted from the calculations.
CTT co-founder John Strand and his firm Strand Consult are soon to release a study highlighting the overstated costs of replacing Huawei equipment in EU...
Early in my Army career, I served as a foreign area officer in Asia focused on China and have spent the succeeding years in intelligence. Right away in my journey as a career military intelligence officer, I came to have great respect for Chinese discipline. They work hard; they sacrifice. What a large number of Chinese leaders, engineers and academics also do quite well is identify and adopt others’ good ideas. They reverse engineer what they have stolen including copying weapon designs for C-17, F-22, and F-35 planes and the Predator drone. They are masters of “hiding in plain sight.”
In 1999, two Chinese colonels published “Unrestricted Warfare,” a seminal piece that described in precise detail how China could assert dominance in competition with Western powers by using all means of warfare without limitations. America’s problem then was it did not see these other means of warfare for what they could become or how they could be employed.
China intentionally blurs the lines between public and private enterprises, to ensure that the nation’s military, espionage, and commercial interests are intertwined. This takes shape...
U.S. prosecutors have charged a Chinese professor with fraud for allegedly taking technology from a California company to benefit Huawei, in another shot at the embattled Chinese telecommunications equipment maker.
Bo Mao was arrested in Texas on Aug. 14 and released six days later on $100,000 bond after he consented to proceed with the case in New York, according to court documents.
He pleaded not guilty in U.S. district court in Brooklyn on Aug. 28 to a charge of conspiring to commit wire fraud.
According to the criminal complaint, Mao entered into an agreement with the unnamed California tech company to obtain its circuit board, claiming it was for academic research.
The complaint, however, accuses an unidentified Chinese telecommunications conglomerate, which sources say is Huawei, of trying to steal the technology, and alleges Mao played a...
U.S. prosecutors are looking into additional instances of alleged technology theft by Huawei Technologies Co., according to people familiar with the matter, potentially expanding beyond existing criminal cases against the Chinese telecommunications giant.
Among the situations being examined are episodes in which Huawei was accused of stealing intellectual property from multiple people and companies over several years, as well as how the company went about recruiting employees from competitors, these people said.
The inquiries, which include a subpoena for documents from Huawei by federal prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, suggest that the government is investigating aspects of Huawei’s business practices that weren’t covered in indictments of Huawei issued earlier this year.
The new inquiries overlap with findings from a Wall Street Journal investigation in May that documented numerous allegations of intellectual property theft against Huawei throughout its history,...
A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) is calling on the Defense Department to end its pattern of purchasing electronic equipment with known cybersecurity risks, particularly from China.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who chairs the SASC Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, issued a letter to Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist Aug. 27 noting her concern that “despite repeated warning from multiple government agencies, DoD is continuing to purchase and use computers and other electronics with known cyber-security risks” including “equipment from a company with connections to the military and cyber espionage programs of” China.
She singles out Lenovo [LNVGF], China’s largest computer company, and calls out the Defense Department for spending more than $2.1 million on the company’s products last year.
Even after repeated warnings from government officials and agencies pertaining to the use of Lenovo and other Chinese products, the DoD IG found that defense...
Earlier this month, our colleague Bronwyn Howell emphasized the high economic costs facing Western nations considering a ban on Huawei equipment in their 5G networks. Her core argument is summed up in one sentence: “Quite simply, Australian and New Zealand political leaders must decide whether they will prioritize US-driven political considerations over local economic ones, which unequivocally rest with China, and by implication, Huawei.” We disagree with two aspects of this assertion: First, despite its recent leadership on the issue, concerns about Huawei are not just “US-driven.” Second, and more fundamentally, the decision is not about politics versus economics, but rather what price countries are willing to pay for secure 5G networks.
While the US has taken the lead in the international campaign to block Huawei from 5G networks, Australia began sounding the alarm in 2018, following an eye-opening war game. That July, Australia announced it would ban Huawei products from its 5G networks. The same month, the UK’s Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre Oversight Board released a report saying it could “provide only limited assurance that all risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks have been sufficiently mitigated.” It was not until late 2018 that the US began publicly campaigning for allies to ban Huawei from their 5G networks. Wariness of Huawei began before the current US campaign against the company.
The presence of Chinese owned technology companies like Huawei raises serious security questions for the United States. Given the level of influence the Chinese Communist...
This week, an interim regulation comes into effect to ban federal agencies from buying telecommunications and surveillance products from Huawei. The law is well overdue—in addition to protecting American intellectual property, the rule will finally help to safeguard the privacy of American citizens.
Despite Huawei’s insistence that it complies with American law, the company has shown a consistent and repeated disregard for the most basic principles of American commerce. From violating sanctions on selling American technology to Iran to blatantly stealing American inventions, the company allegedly rides roughshod over American regulations, both inside and out of the United States.
Even if Huawei’s executives are sincere in their intentions, many argue that the Chinese legal system enables Communist Party apparatchiks to compel the company to do their bidding....
DoD) Inspector General (IG) report released on July 30 found that more than 9,000 commercially available IT products (COTS) purchased in FY 2018 — costing at least $32.8 million — could be used to spy, surveille, or sabotage US military personnel and facilities. In contrast to traditional DoD processes for large acquisitions such as weapon systems, aircraft, and command and control systems, these purchases were made via Government Purchase Cards which are intended to simplify procurement of less than $10,000.
However, just because the dollar amount are small doesn’t mean that risk is reduced, as the products in question were long identified as security threats. Moreover, many of the most devastating cybersecurity attacks such as those against Target, Equifax, and the Office of Personnel Management were instigated at low levels of approval and control, frequently via contractors or COTS devices. The report warns that “if the DoD continues to purchase and use COTS information technology items without identifying, assessing, and mitigating the known vulnerabilities associated with COTS information technology items, missions critical to national security could be compromised.” While it is not clear whether discussed in the redacted report, the issue could be that contractors or others with purchasing cards are not up to speed on the vulnerabilities.
The IG audit shows that the US Army and Air Force purchased thousands of products already flagged as security risks. They include over 8,000 printers...
