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.
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.
You’re just as dishonest as the last one.
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.