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’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.