Showing 107 posts tagged china
China Bans 7 Topics in University Classrooms
In an effort to curb Western influence, China’s leaders have reportedly banned the discussion of seven subjects in university classrooms, including press freedom, universal values, and the historical mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party.
Chinese professors and political analysts said a recent directive from Beijing to universities indicated an awareness among the country’s leaders that the government is losing its ideological grip over students and younger faculty members.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
“Alarmed by the scope and audacity of the breach, the company went public with the news in January 2010, becoming the first U.S. firm to voluntarily disclose an intrusion that originated in China. In a blog post, Google chief legal officer David Drummond said hackers stole the source code that powers Google’s vaunted search engine and also targeted the e-mail accounts of activists critical of China’s human rights abuses. As Google was responding to the breach, its technicians made another startling discovery: its database with years of information on surveillance orders had been hacked. The database included information on thousands of orders issued by judges around the country to law enforcement agents seeking to monitor suspects’ e-mails. The most sensitive orders, however, came from a federal court that approves surveillance of foreign targets such as spies, diplomats, suspected terrorists and agents of other governments. Those orders, issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are classified.”
3 NYU Researchers Are Accused of Secretly Sharing Information With China
Three medical researchers at New York University have been charged with commercial bribery for allegedly trading information about their magnetic-resonance-imaging research for payments from a Chinese company, according to The Wall Street Journal and a news release by federal prosecutors.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said in the news release that two of the researchers, Yudong Zhu and Xing Yang, were arrested on Sunday. The third, Ye Li, was believed to have flown to China before charges could be brought. All three were charged with one count of commercial bribery. Mr. Zhu, an associate professor of radiology, was also charged with falsifying records in connection with a National Institutes of Health grant that financed the research. The three were accused of concealing ties to a Chinese medical-imaging company and a research institute sponsored by the Chinese government.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Pentagon: Chinese government waging cyberattacks
The Pentagon for the first time used its annual report on China to directly assert that Beijing’s government and military have conducted computer-based attacks against the U.S., including efforts to steal information from federal agencies.
In a new report on the Chinese military, the Defense Department goes a small step further than it has gone in the past, when it said that cyber-attacks originated in China and may be linked to Beijing’s use of civilian experts in clandestine attacks against American companies. But over the past year, U.S. government officials and private cyber-security experts have increasingly stepped up accusations that the Chinese government is directly involved in cyber espionage against the U.S.
“China was involved in 96% of all espionage data-breach incidents, most often targeting manufacturing, professional and transportation industries. The assets China targeted within those industries included laptop/desktop, file server, mail server and directory server, in order to steal credentials, internal organization data, trade secrets and system info. A whopping 95% of the attacks started with phishing to get a toehold into their victim’s systems. The report states that, “Phishing techniques have become much more sophisticated, often targeting specific individuals (spear phishing) and using tactics that are harder for IT to control. For example, now that people are suspicious of email, phishers are using phone calls and social networking.”
“I think we have to take action with China to stop the PLA from bombarding us hourly with these hack attacks,” Rogers said. “They’ve stolen all sorts of weaponry from us and research, even the F-35. And I would hope that the department would be much more aggressive on the cybersecurity front.”
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Daily chart: What China’s online censorship systems block* | The Economist
Though official data on the operation of China’s two state-run online censorship systems, the Great Firewall and Golden Shield, are unavailable for obvious reasons, various studies have been conducted to infer how many people are hitting the delete keys by measuring how quickly sensitive material disappears from sites. This method suggests, for instance, that Sina Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) alone employs 4,000 censors.
» via The Economist
U.S. law to restrict government purchases of Chinese IT equipment
Congress quietly tucked in a new cyber-espionage review process for U.S. government technology purchases into the funding law signed this week by President Barack Obama, reflecting growing U.S. concern over Chinese cyber attacks.
The law prevents NASA, and the Justice and Commerce Departments from buying information technology systems unless federal law enforcement officials give their OK.
A provision in the 240-page spending law requires the agencies to make a formal assessment of “cyber-espionage or sabotage” risk in consultation with law enforcement authorities when considering buying information technology systems.
» via Reuters
Top China college in focus with ties to army's cyber-spying unit
Faculty members at a top Chinese university have collaborated for years on technical research papers with a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit accused of being at the heart of China’s alleged cyber-war against Western commercial targets.
Several papers on computer network security and intrusion detection, easily accessed on the Internet, were co-authored by researchers at PLA Unit 61398, allegedly an operational unit actively engaged in cyber-espionage, and faculty at Shanghai Jiaotong University, a centre of academic excellence with ties to some of the world’s top universities and attended by the country’s political and business elite.
The apparent working relationship between the PLA unit and Shanghai Jiaotong is in contrast to common practice in most developed nations, where university professors in recent decades have been reluctant to cooperate with operational intelligence gathering units.
» via Reuters
Nearly 35% Of Chinese Android Apps Steal User Data: Report
A fresh report from the Data Center of China Internet says that close to 35% of Android apps surveyed were slurping user data that was unrelated to the app’s function without alerting the phone’s owners about the practice. Nearly 67% of apps surveyed were tracking data, but only some were abusing this power.
» via Fast Company
