cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2653687
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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Because criticizing china on that stuff is like beating a dead horse. Of course the autocratic country is gonna spy on their citizens and other countries, and engage in state sponsored hacking (and, mind you, I think it’s ok for a State to use hacking defensively). But our leaders are criticizing them for that and foaming at the mouth to do the same shit domestically, which makes us look hypocritical as fuck and opens us up to stupid headlines like “Putin blasts France for police violence during recent protests” (which is very tangentially related but a very common one over here)
I guess I got jumpy because I recently watched a video about this that ended with the usual “the state pulled out an obscure old law and shut down the lawsuit and possibly proceeded to secretly fuck with the whistleblower for a while”.