China is building a cyber army of hackers: Report
www.firstpost.com
Hackathons are common, but Chinese hacking competitions are different. China has been dominating popular international cybersecurity competitions like Pwn2Own. However, more recently, the country has developed its own hacking contests, essentially withdrawing from international events

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Hackathons are common, but Chinese hacking competitions are different.

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In 2017, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of Chinese cybersecurity giant Qihoo 360, publicly criticised the practice of sharing vulnerability discoveries internationally, arguing that such strategic assets should stay within China. His sentiments, supported by the Chinese government, gave birth to the national hacking competition called the Tianfu Cup. The contest is focused on discovering vulnerabilities in global tech products like Apple iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft systems.

How is Tianfu Cup different?

A 2018 rule mandates participants of the Tianfu Cup to hand over their findings to the government, instead of the tech companies.

Dakota Cary, a China-focused consultant at the US cybersecurity company SentinelOne, said, “In practice, this meant vulnerabilities were passed to the state for use in operations.”

This approach effectively turned hacking competitions into a government pipeline for acquiring zero-day vulnerabilities — software flaws unknown to vendors and extremely valuable for cyber-espionage.

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In recent years, China’s hacking competitions have increasingly shifted focus toward breaching domestic products, including Chinese-made electric vehicles, phones, and security software.

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  • randomname@scribe.disroot.orgOPEnglish
    21·
    8 months ago

    Do you fundamentally disagree with what China is accused of but fully support Israel and the US’s extrajudicial backdoors, Trojan horses, domestic spying, pager bomb assasinations, AI targeted air strikes, and other clandestine war crimes just because they are perpetrated by “the good guys”?

    I fundamentally disagree with what China is doing as much as with what Russia and Israel are doing (and a lot of others).

    Seems that many people here have a strong pro-China bias but are criticizing others for the same things. I read on another thread some time ago here that someone calling this a, ‘The West bad, China bad okay’ stance. I’d call it hypocritical, double standards, all that what whataboutery stands for.