Tag: Espionage and Intelligence Services

Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship

Chin@Strategy

One posting from Hainan Xiandun stood out. The ad, on a Sichuan University computer science hiring board from 2018, boasted that Xiandun had “received a considerable number of government-secret-related business.” The company, based in Hainan’s capital, Haikou, paid monthly salaries of $1,200 to $3,000 — solid middle-class wages for Chinese tech workers fresh out of college — with bonuses as high as $15,000. Xiandun’s ads listed an email address used by other firms looking for cybersecurity experts and linguists, suggesting they were part of a network. Chinese hacking groups are…

U.S. intelligence agencies delivered a report to Biden on the virus’s origins.

Chin@Strategy

The director of national intelligence on Tuesday delivered a report to President Biden on the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, according to U.S. officials, but the nation’s spy agencies have not yet concluded whether the disease was the result of an accidental leak from a lab or if it emerged naturally in a spillover from animals to humans. Mr. Biden had ordered the nation’s intelligence agencies three months ago to draft a report on the origins of the virus amid an intensifying debate over questions about its provenance, and in…