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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As a response to several of the posts in this thread: It is really amazing how many people here on Lemmy are downplaying or even denying China’s crimes (even many admins and mods). You can post articles critical of the US, EU, Australian or any other government, but if you post a China-critical text you are whatabouted to death. The tonality of many of these comments alone is very telling.
You can post articles critical of the US, EU, Australian or any other government, but if you post a China-critical text you are whatabouted to death.
this will be a blunt comment. people would have no problem if you were doing this, but just in a quick scan, something like 10 of your last 15 submissions on our instance (Beehaw) are you obsessively posting about China–often from sources that are straight up fearmongering and/or guilty of doing literally the same thing they’re complaining China is doing. one of the most egregious submissions you’ve made in this vein is quite literally from the House Select Committee on China, as if the American government’s committee on “competition with the United States” doesn’t obviously have a vested interest in portraying things China does in the most uncharitable light possible (much as China would for America).
separately, and in a Beehaw context: at least from our userbase, you will largely not find disagreement that China is bad–nobody here really needs to be proselytized to the fact that China is an authoritarian capitalist country guilty of acts of imperialism against their neighbors, and probably of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Xinjiang. in fact, partially because of our political disagreements in that space, we do not federate with many of the Lemmy instances you might characterize as “pro-China.” this fact makes it incredibly conspicuous when someone like yourself obsessively posts every neurosis a Western country has about China on our instance. we’ve had a pattern of several users doing this in the past year or so–and at this point it’s blatantly propagandistic and Sinophobic bullshit we’re just not interested in letting people use our instance for.
even if you aren’t doing this for propagandistic reasons, though, and just think you need to push back against pro-China campists on Lemmy or whatever: this is also not your personal anti-China dumping ground, nor is it a place for you to shadowbox with campists who think China is cool. if you are genuinely posting in good faith: diversify your submissions and, if you don’t, at least drop the persecution complex when people push back on your voluminous China posting; if this is just using us as some middle-man in a bigger thing: going forward we’re going to aggressively prune these types of post.
Yeah, no, don’t frame it like you’re a victim of pro China trolls. You post mostly any anti China material you can get your hands on, so don’t freak out if people are critical with some.
What does ‘dishonest’ mean in this context?
Your comment supports exactly what I said. I have been here on Lemmy for only a short period of time, but I have been observing that whenever one posts an article critical of China, this user gets whatabouted to death (and sometimes called “idiot”, “F@ing liberal”, and other names). One user here in this thread even asked me whether I support the war in Israel (!) - because I posted an article on China “building a cyber army of hackers.”
What is this?
Such behavior is so widespread here on Lemmy that I argue it must be orchestrated, this doesn’t rise up organically. And it appears to be supported not only by users but also by many admins and mods.
I will stop responding to this kind of comments, btw. This is off-topic and leads to nowhere.
Why is this article “critical with China”? From the sound of it, the Tianfu Cup is clear about its goals, that’s a surprisingly high level of transparency. All hackathons are geared towards finding and hiring hackers, both by companies and by governments. This way, people can decide whether they want to be recruited by the CCP or not.
Chinese hacking competitions (plural) are different
A 2018 rule mandates participants of the Tianfu Cup (singular) to hand over their findings to the government
This approach effectively turned hacking competitions (plural)
So the article uses one competition doing this to assert this as “Chinese hacking competitions”. There are tens if not hundreds of hackathons in China.
Please stop posting these heavily biased or misleading articles about China from questionable sites.
We get it, you don’t like China. We got that after the first 50 posts about China being bad. Most of us don’t like the CCP either.
But at least post reputable sources that don’t push agendas quite so blatantly.
For anyone interested, this site (firstpost.com) is an english-language Indian news site owned by Network18, a news conglomerate with a right-leaning, pro-Modi bias.
It’s a good thing we dissolved our federal cybersecurity.
Must be nice having an education.
oh no, not my country’s enterprise systems!
anyway…
This story deserves a “no doy!”
All major world powers are bolstering their cybersecurity. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t survive in such an opportunistic world.
This is not about ‘bolstering cybersecurity’ but rather about attacking other countries. There is nothing even remotely similar to a ‘Tianfu Cup’ in any other country.
As I asked already in another thread: Why is it that whenever one posts something critical of China here on Lemmy, there is some commentary arguing that the US is doing the same? I don’t understand that.
That’s whataboutery back and forth.
This post is critical of China? I thought it shows their competency and forethought. I wish my government was competent enough to realize the importance of cyber warfare and organize such contests.
Embedding Trojans in your enemy’s infrastructure and leaving them to be switched on in times of war is ABSOLUTELY defense. You may not like it. But that’s called cyber warfare.
Quick question: 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”?
nice try derailing the conversation with a “quick question”, let’s ignore it.
you are correct, it is cyber warfare, and china sees the US as their enemy. however it is not “ABSOLUTELY” defense.
i guess the conventional warfare equivalent would be to place explosives on the territory of your enemy to set it off in case of war. which smells way more like preparing active warfare than some kind of defense.
it brings it’s own set of problems as well. let’s say they get triggered by accident, either by incompetency or a third conflict party.
it will be very hard to explain why they were there in the first place, and “yes we deployed the <insert ‘defensive’ measure> on your soil, but it wasn’t us who triggered it.” might just not cut it.
This is (deploying malware and backdoors outside of wartime, often widely) criticisized very often and rightfully so. By both cybersecurity people and various political leanings, especially leftists.
Your analogy is good. These things are often intended to kill, and are often countervalue (read: target civilians). It is in fact bad no matter what state does it. It however should also come as no surprise that all states variously want to, though for example the usa has historically gone back and forth on how selective they are for many of the reasons you state. Though other reasons include things like not revealing exact capabilities by releasing malware ahead of time to be spotted and studied.
Thanks for your reply, it made some good points. It however didn’t need the part starting with “It however…” as phrases like this simply devalue everything that was written before them, and are usually followed by a change of topic.
The topic was the question if deploying trojans in another country’s infrastructure counts as an “ABSOLUTELY defensive” measure.
It is in fact bad no matter what state does it.
This could have been a perfect sentence to finish with, don’t you think? ;)
what a strangely passive aggressive and rude response. if you want a comment written in your voice and chosen thoughts, you are free to do so.
Quick question also to you: Do you fundamentally disagree with what Israel and the US are accused of but fully support China’s domestic surveillance, transnational repression, supression of free speech and freedom of the press, bullying of its neighbours, aggression against Taiwan, just because they are perpetrated by “the good guys”?
You conveniently dodged my question, then asked me stupid questions, thinking I’d have to agree with cherry-picked offenses by China. I am not a fan of China. I just think they are justified in defending themselves. Furthermore, I think it’s hilarious that the the US decided to offshore our high tech goods to have them manufactured there as if we weren’t ASKING to be hacked. The only solution going forward is CLEARLY domestic RISC-V manufacturing and not allowing our enemies to manufacture our critical technologies.
Do I support China’s:
- domestic surveillance: of course not
- transnational repression: of course not
- supression (sp!) of free speech and freedom of the press: of course not
- bullying of its neighbours: of course not
- aggression against Taiwan: of course not
Do I support China engaging in pre-emptive cyber warfare against aggressors: absolutely
Do I support the US engaging in pre-emptive cyber warfare against aggressors: absolutely
Do I support Israel engaging in pre-emptive cyber warfare against aggressors: absolutely
Do I support war crimes being committed by ANY of these countries: NO
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It reminds me of the PowerPoint my company had.
It was this graph showing how many tech people they have since 1960, and the numbers kept multiplying.
How they rated tech people was someone who works behind the computer. So yeah, as we gain more employees, we tend to put them behind computers to do work?
who does not ?
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