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Chinese Spies Are Trying To Reach UK Lawmakers Via LinkedIn, MI5 Warns

2 weeks ago
MI5 has warned U.K. lawmakers that Chinese intelligence operatives are using LinkedIn and recruitment fronts to target them for information gathering and long-term cultivation. PBS reports: Writing to lawmakers, House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said a new MI5 "espionage alert" warned that Chinese nationals were "using LinkedIn profiles to conduct outreach at scale" on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. "Their aim is to collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants acting on their behalf," he said. MI5 issued the alert because the activity was "targeted and widespread," he added. The MI5 alert cited LinkedIn profiles of two women, Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen, and said other similar recruiters' profiles were acting as fronts for espionage. Home Office Minister Dan Jarvis said that apart from parliamentary staff, others including economists, think tank consultants and government officials have been similarly targeted. Jarvis said the government is rolling out a series of measures to tackle the risk, including investing 170 million pounds ($224 million) to renew encrypted technology used by civil servants to safeguard sensitive work. Opposition parties say authorities are not doing enough and are too wary of jeopardizing trade ties with China.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

2 weeks ago
Thought it was the victim of a ‘hyper-scale DDoS attack’ before finding the fix

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has admitted that the cause of its massive Tuesday outage was a change to database permissions, and that the company initially thought the symptoms of that adjustment indicated it was the target of a “hyper-scale DDoS attack,” before figuring out the real problem.…

Simon Sharwood

Mexico Partially Lifts Longstanding Website Ban On Tor Network

2 weeks ago
Mexico has finally lifted its long-running Tor ban for the main government portal, allowing privacy-focused users, journalists, and activists to access gob.mx again after more than a decade of blocking. That said, the open data portal and the former Tor-compatible whistleblower system remain inaccessible. CyberInsider reports: The development follows a long period of digital censorship that spanned two full six-year presidential terms, those of Enrique Pena Nieto and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and continued into the early months of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo's current administration. Research conducted by Jacobo Najera and Miguel Trujillo, published in October 2023, documented that 21 federal government agencies were blocking traffic from the Tor network, effectively excluding privacy-conscious users from vital public resources and services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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