It’s no secret that President Xi Jinping’s government uses technology companies to help maintain the nation’s massive surveillance apparatus.
But in addition to forcing businesses operating in China to stockpile and hand over info about their users for censorship and state-snooping purposes, a black market for individuals’ sensitive data is also booming. Corporate and government insiders have access to this harvested private info, and the financial incentives to sell the data to fraudsters and crooks to exploit.
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“The data is being collected by rich and powerful people that control technology companies and work in the government, but it can also be used against them in all of these scams and fraud and other low-level crimes,” [SpyCloud infosec researcher Aurora] Johnson says.
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To get their hands on the personal info, Chinese data brokers often recruit shady insiders with wanted ads seeking “friends” working in government, and promise daily income of 20,000 to 70,000 yuan ($2,700 and $9,700) in exchange for harvested information. This data is then used to pull off scams, fraud, and suchlike.
Some of these data brokers also claim to have “signed formal contracts” with the big three Chinese telecom companies: China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom. The brokers’ marketing materials tout they are able to legally obtain and sell details of people’s internet habits via the Chinese telcos’ deep packet inspection systems, which monitor as well as manage and store network traffic. (The West has also seen this kind of thing.)
Crucially, this level of surveillance by the telcos gives their employees access to users’ browsing data and other info, which workers can then swipe and then resell themselves through various brokers.
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“There is a huge ecosystem of Chinese breached and leaked data, and I don’t know that a lot of Western cybersecurity researchers are looking at this,” Johnson continued. “It poses privacy risks to all Chinese people across all groups. And then it also gives us Western cybersecurity researchers a really interesting source to track some of these actors that have been targeting critical infrastructure.”
it also doesn’t help that things like the 3GPP and 5GPP membership was awash with gaming the system to ensure Chinese national interests almost always made it into the spec regardless of the technical flaws or objections. This is one reason Western nations ripped out Chinese 5G network appliances a couple years ago.
They were supposed to but here in the US as of mid-2024 some 40% of them hadn’t yet done so. I wonder how far the RotW has gotten with it.
I haven’t seen it discussed but I do wonder if this is at the root of the Telco hack the US experienced / is still experiencing.
Edit: The EU nations are very much a mixed bag and some of the largest EU countries, such as Germany, not only still have Huawei gear in their 5G networks but it doesn’t have to be removed until the end of 2026!