serisec

Category: China

  • Alleged Silk Typhoon hacker extradited to the United States to face charges

    Alleged Silk Typhoon hacker extradited to the United States to face charges A man accused of working as a hacker for China’s Ministry of State Security has been extradited to the USA from Italy, and faces – if found guilty – the prospect of decades behind bars. Read more in my article on the Hot…

  • US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers

    US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers This is for new routers; you don’t have to throw away your existing ones: The Executive Branch determination noted that foreign-produced routers (1) introduce “a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt the U.S. economy, critical infrastructure, and national defense” and (2) pose “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be…

  • Twitter suspended 800 million accounts last year – so why does manipulation remain so rampant?

    Twitter suspended 800 million accounts last year – so why does manipulation remain so rampant? Elon Musk’s social media site says it suspended 800 million accounts in a year for spam and manipulation – but with state-backed campaigns still flooding the platform, the real question is how many fake accounts remain. Read more in my…

  • Backdoor in Notepad++

    Backdoor in Notepad++ Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users. Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal…

  • AI Coding Assistants Secretly Copying All Code to China

    AI Coding Assistants Secretly Copying All Code to China There’s a new report about two AI coding assistants, used by 1.5 million developers, that are surreptitiously sending a copy of everything they ingest to China. Maybe avoid using them. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Friday Squid Blogging: The Chinese Squid-Fishing Fleet off the Argentine Coast

    Friday Squid Blogging: The Chinese Squid-Fishing Fleet off the Argentine Coast The latest article on this topic. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Telegram Hosting World’s Largest Darknet Market

    Telegram Hosting World’s Largest Darknet Market Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram. The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram…

  • Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds

    Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds Scammers are generating images of broken merchandise in order to apply for refunds. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Chinese Surveillance and AI

    Chinese Surveillance and AI New report: “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights.” From a summary article: China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope…

  • Huawei and Chinese Surveillance

    Huawei and Chinese Surveillance This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. “Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change…

  • Scam USPS and E-Z Pass Texts and Websites

    Scam USPS and E-Z Pass Texts and Websites Google has filed a complaint in court that details the scam: In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people…

  • Smashing Security podcast #442: The hack that messed with time, and rogue ransom where negotiators

    Smashing Security podcast #442: The hack that messed with time, and rogue ransom where negotiators Time itself comes under attack as a state-backed hacking gang spends two years tunnelling toward a nation’s master clock — with chaos potentially only a tick away. Plus when ransomware negotiators turn to the dark side, what could possibly go…

  • BRONZE BUTLER exploits Japanese asset management software vulnerability

    BRONZE BUTLER exploits Japanese asset management software vulnerability The threat group targeted a LANSCOPE zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-61932) mindimcdowell Go to sophos

  • Social Engineering People’s Credit Card Details

    Social Engineering People’s Credit Card Details Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information: Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid…

  • Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies

    Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies Details from leaked documents: While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions on research and development,…

  • China Accuses Nvidia of Putting Backdoors into Their Chips

    China Accuses Nvidia of Putting Backdoors into Their Chips The government of China has accused Nvidia of inserting a backdoor into their H20 chips: China’s cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called “serious security issues” with the company’s artificial intelligence chips. It said US AI experts…

  • Another Supply Chain Vulnerability

    Another Supply Chain Vulnerability ProPublica is reporting: Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems—with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel—leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found. The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the…

  • New Mobile Phone Forensics Tool

    New Mobile Phone Forensics Tool The Chinese have a new tool called Massistant. Massistant is the presumed successor to Chinese forensics tool, “MFSocket”, reported in 2019 and attributed to publicly traded cybersecurity company, Meiya Pico. The forensics tool works in tandem with a corresponding desktop software. Massistant gains access to device GPS location data, SMS…

  • Chinese-Owned VPNs

    Chinese-Owned VPNs One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain. A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by Chinese companies. It would…

  • Communications Backdoor in Chinese Power Inverters

    Communications Backdoor in Chinese Power Inverters This is a weird story: U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. […] Over the past nine months, undocumented…

  • Chinese AI Submersible

    Chinese AI Submersible A Chinese company has developed an AI-piloted submersible that can reach speeds “similar to a destroyer or a US Navy torpedo,” dive “up to 60 metres underwater,” and “remain static for more than a month, like the stealth capabilities of a nuclear submarine.” In case you’re worried about the military applications of…

  • China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon

    China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon The Wall Street Journal has the story: Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate.…

  • China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing

    China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing Former CISA Director Jen Easterly writes about a new international intelligence sharing co-op: Historically, China, Russia, Iran & North Korea have cooperated to some extent on military and intelligence matters, but differences in language, culture, politics & technological sophistication have hindered deeper collaboration, including in cyber. Shifting…

  • Silk Typhoon Hackers Indicted

    Silk Typhoon Hackers Indicted Lots of interesting details in the story: The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the indictment of 12 Chinese individuals accused of more than a decade of hacker intrusions around the world, including eight staffers for the contractor i-Soon, two officials at China’s Ministry of Public Security who allegedly worked…

  • Experts Flag Security, Privacy Risks in DeepSeek AI App

    Experts Flag Security, Privacy Risks in DeepSeek AI App New mobile apps from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek have remained among the top three “free” downloads for Apple and Google devices since their debut on Jan. 25, 2025. But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption…

  • US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks

    US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks From the Washington Post: The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled cameras to infiltrate government and industrial targets in the United States, Taiwan, Europe and elsewhere. Bruce Schneier…

  • Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow

    Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier