China is building a cyber army of hackers: Report
www.firstpost.com
Hackathons are common, but Chinese hacking competitions are different. China has been dominating popular international cybersecurity competitions like Pwn2Own. However, more recently, the country has developed its own hacking contests, essentially withdrawing from international events

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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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  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    51·
    11 hours ago

    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.