Caught in the act?

[guyfriday]

Well this was unexpected.

An Online Dump of Chinese Hacking Documents Offers a Rare Window into Pervasive State Surveillance | Military.com

  Chinese police are investigating an unauthorized and highly unusual online dump of documents from a private security contractor linked to the nation's top policing agency and other parts of its government — a trove that catalogs apparent hacking activity and tools to spy on both Chinese and foreigners.
 
Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon: ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests, such as Hong Kong or the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang in China’s far west.

The dump of scores of documents late last week and subsequent investigation were confirmed by two employees of I-Soon, known as Anxun in Mandarin, which has ties to the powerful Ministry of Public Security. The dump, which analysts consider highly significant even if it does not reveal any especially novel or potent tools, includes hundreds of pages of contracts, marketing presentations, product manuals, and client and employee lists.

The story linked provides a lot of details, but I didn't see any actual link to the data (which now that we know, I'm sure someone here or there will get access to that data "somehow")

Some major take-a-ways from this story:

 The hacking tools are used by Chinese state agents to unmask users of social media platforms outside China such as X, formerly known as Twitter, break into email and hide the online activity of overseas agents. Also described are devices disguised as power strips and batteries that can be used to compromise Wi-Fi networks.

Does Elon know about this, and if so will he be exposing this spy information?

 He said organizations targeted by I-Soon — according to the leaked material — include governments, telecommunications firms abroad and online gambling companies within China.
Until the 190-megabyte leak, I-Soon’s website included a page listing clients topped by the Ministry of Public Security and including 11 provincial-level security bureaus and some 40 municipal public security departments.

looks like a lot of those "gambling apps" in the ol'app store will be off line soon. 

  Internal documents in the leak describe I-Soon databases of hacked data collected from foreign networks around the world that are advertised and sold to Chinese police.

So this is an interesting quote since it implies that Chinese Police have to buy they intel. Is this what set off the "HACKing" in the first place, some CCP member not getting a cut, or maybe a PLA loyalist?

 I-Soon’s tools appear to be used by Chinese police to curb dissent on overseas social media and flood them with pro-Beijing content. Authorities can surveil Chinese social media platforms directly and order them to take down anti-government posts. But they lack that ability on overseas sites like Facebook or X, where millions of Chinese users flock to in order to evade state surveillance and censorship.

 
I guess that's why it was stated that China is using so much money in over-seas branding to "pretty-up" their image. 

 
One leaked draft contract shows I-Soon was marketing “anti-terror” technical support to Xinjiang police to track the region’s native Uyghurs in Central and Southeast Asia, claiming it had access to hacked airline, cellular and government data from countries like Mongolia, Malaysia, Afghanistan and Thailand. It is unclear whether the contact was signed.
 
“We see a lot of targeting of organizations that are related to ethnic minorities — Tibetans, Uyghurs. A lot of the targeting of foreign entities can be seen through the lens of domestic security priorities for the government,” said Dakota Cary, a China analyst with the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.
 
He said the documents appear legitimate because they align with what would be expected from a contractor hacking on behalf of China’s security apparatus with domestic political priorities.

 
Well, we already knew that Human rights are violated in China, but maybe this just confirms how entangled their intelligence services are in in it. I am left wondering if this tool is used in supporting the genocide of the Uyghurs as well?

 Cary found a spreadsheet with a list of data repositories collected from victims and counted 14 governments as targets, including India, Indonesia and Nigeria.

 

 Cary was also struck by the targeting of Taiwan’s Health Ministry to determine its COVID-19 caseload in early 2021 – and impressed by the low cost of some of the hacks. The documents show that I-Soon charged $55,000 to hack Vietnam’s economy ministry, he said.

 

 Although a few chat records refer to NATO, there is no indication of a successful hack of any NATO country, an initial review of the data by The Associated Press found. That doesn’t mean state-backed Chinese hackers are not trying to hack the U.S. and it’s allies, though. If the leaker is inside China, which seems likely, Cary said that “leaking information about hacking NATO would be really, really inflammatory" — a risk apt to make Chinese authorities more determined to identify the hacker.

Now given all those countries listed, it almost seems that NATO and the US are not being mentioned by name out of concerns. This bit about another system in the article does talk about that though;

 Mathieu Tartare, a malware researcher at the cybersecurity firm ESET, says it has linked I-Soon to a Chinese state hacking group it calls Fishmonger that it actively tracks and which it wrote about in January 2020 after the group hacked Hong Kong universities during student protests. He said it has, since 2022, seen Fishmonger target governments, NGOs and think tanks across Asia, Europe, Central America and the United States.

 
And, this is funny. 

 On Monday, Mao Ning, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the U.S. government has long been working to compromise China’s critical infrastructure. She demanded the U.S. “stop using cybersecurity issues to smear other countries.”

Ring-ring
Hello?
Hey kettle, you're black.

looks like China got hit hard on their spying. Weird that they use a third party company to hide their spying when everyone knows that all Chinese businesses are owned by the CCP. Talk about getting caught with your pants down.

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China's mysterious vanishing MaosーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS (youtube.com)

In this video (which is not viewable outside of NHK World) they talk to people about missing Mao Statues, and the answers to get are nonexistent. Now why would this happen? I think this virtual "great Wall is falling down, and China will either be acting out stupidly or shutting itself off from the world once again.

I want to address this. There have been a number of identical statue of Chairman Mao that have been put up and now have disappeared lately. There is a rumor that China can only afford one statue and is just shuffling it around. I'm not sure if this is true, but China took a pretty big hit economically recently, and they may have gone broke.