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Kicking off this week, China has invited<\/a> foreign tech corporations to join its government\u2019s central technical committee. Technical Committee 260, which reports to the Cyberspace Administration of China, is responsible<\/a> for establishing China\u2019s cyber security standards and will now feature Cisco, IBM, Intel and Microsoft as members. The move comes after intense criticism<\/a> of China\u2019s cyber regulations for being tough on international business interests, and has been interpreted as an attempt to placate those concerns. Ostensibly, these companies will now play a role in drafting China\u2019s cyber security legislation; however the extent of their influence is still an unknown.<\/p>\n Cyber cooperation isn\u2019t all Beijing has on its mind however. Kaspersky stats show Chinese hacking of the defense, aviation and nuclear industries in Russia has almost tripled<\/a> since the beginning of the year. The clear focus on cyber espionage targeting critical national interests, rather than financial cybercrime on corporations, suggests these activities were either approved or undertaken by official Chinese representatives. This uptick of Russia\u2019s cyber suffering at the hands of the Chinese has interestingly coincided with a recent drop<\/a> in Chinese targeting of the US in cyberspace. Russia and China have historically demonstrated a fair degree of cooperation on cyber security, creating<\/a> and updating<\/a> a code of conduct for information security through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2011 and 2015, signing a bilateral \u2018non-aggression pact<\/a>\u2019 in May last year and releasing a joint statement<\/a> in June this year. However, these recent hacking trends may have confirmed suspicions<\/a> that such public comradeship may only be surface deep.<\/p>\n Privacy feathers have been ruffled this week, with WhatsApp announcing<\/a> a new information sharing deal with Facebook. WhatsApp will now<\/a> disclose phone numbers and user activity analytics to its parent company in order to facilitate more targeted advertising and friend suggestions on Facebook, as well as fight spam. The new policy has raised eyebrows<\/a> across the world, representing WhatsApp\u2019s first diversion from its famous privacy vow<\/a> and Facebook\u2019s first steps to monetise the platform since purchasing it for US$22 billion in 2014. The good news is that users have the choice to opt-out<\/a> of this new policy change\u2014but you\u2019d better move fast because the window to do so is only open for 30 days. WhatsApp has provided a slightly awkward \u2018how-to\u2019 guide here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The privacy battle between government and civil society continues in America. Last week, tech giants vocally rejected<\/a> the Obama administration\u2019s proposal to request the social media accounts of foreign visitors in an attempt to identify terrorist threats. The proposed change<\/a> would create a field stating \u2018please enter information associated with your online presence\u2019 on the US\u2019s ESTA and I-94W arrival\/departure forms. The companies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, warn<\/a> that the proposed measure will \u2018have a chilling effect on the use of social media networks, online sharing and, ultimately, free speech online\u2019. Civil liberties advocacy groups have also argued<\/a> in an open letter that beyond invading individuals\u2019 personal privacy, this measure will be \u2018ineffective and prohibitively expensive to implement and maintain\u2019.<\/p>\n Across the Atlantic, France and Germany are pushing<\/a> for a European crackdown on encryption technology in response to the recent wave of terrorist attacks in Europe. The German Interior Minister, Thomas De Maizi\u00e8re, and his French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, put forward a joint proposal<\/a> calling on the European Commission to draft a law obliging<\/a> online messaging services to monitor content and assist law enforcement with decryption efforts when required. As expected, the move sparked opposition<\/a> from European industry groups who argue that enforcing such backdoors \u2018ultimately leaves online systems more vulnerable\u2019. It seems Europe is following in the footsteps of the privacy\u2013security debate that has unfolded in the US over the last year.<\/p>\n Debate continues over the identity, capability and credibility of the Shadow Broker hackers who several weeks ago<\/a> hosted on online auction of programs apparently nabbed from the NSA. Importantly, this content was stolen from another hacking team<\/a>, Equation Group, and is actually fairly old, containing no programs more recent than October 2013. The indirect leak supposedly reveals some of the top secret cyber tools used by the spy agency to surveil American security companies such as Cisco and Fortinet. However, recent realisations<\/a> that these tools contain the ability to compromise the firewalls of Chinese tech manufacturer Huawei have given even deeper insight into the scope of NSA operations. The contents of the Shadow Brokers dump have seemingly been confirmed as authentic<\/a> by correlations with previously unreleased Snowden documents. Learn more about the speculated \u2018who and how\u2019 of the hack with this Engadget <\/em>article<\/a> and read this Lawfare<\/em> piece<\/a> for a low down of the questions that should be asked of the NSA in response.<\/p>\n And finally, check out Monday night\u2019s episode of Four Corners, boldly titled \u2018Cyber War<\/a>\u2019. While it won\u2019t teach well-informed cyber nerds anything new, it\u2019s a welcome fourth estate attempt to raise public awareness of cyber security. You can read commentary on the episode here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kicking off this week, China has invited foreign tech corporations to join its government\u2019s central technical committee. Technical Committee 260, which reports to the Cyberspace Administration of China, is responsible for establishing China\u2019s cyber security …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":390,"featured_media":28417,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,391,1570,728,224],"class_list":["post-28416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-china","tag-cyber","tag-encryption","tag-hacking","tag-social-media"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n