There are fresh signs of Chinese industrial espionage. Recorded Future late yesterday reported that much of the online spying is staged through Tsinghua University infrastructure. While looking into Chinese government cyber surveillance of Tibetan groups, the company observed what it called a "novel Linux backdoor," ext4, in use. Analysis of ext4 led the researchers to discover connection attempts to a compromised Tsinghua University CentOS server.
The operations run through university infrastructure served economic development as well as domestic security goals. Operators targeted Alaskan state government sites, including the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (Alaskan extraction industries are major exporters to China), UN Offices in Kenya and the Kenya Ports Authority, and German automotive manufacturer Daimler AG.
Other Chinese espionage campaigns independently reported have targeted Malaysian organizations.
The Intercept reports that a SNAFU on the part of both British and Canadian Governments have misconfigured project management software Trello in a way that exposed sensitive information.
Epic Games, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite, pulled their signature game from Google Play as a business move to avoid Google's thirty-percent cut of downloads—understandable, because that's a lot of Vbucks by any standard. Cybercriminals have noticed this, and are using bogus Fortnite download sites to spread various forms of malware. Google Play's walled garden may be more chain-link than moated stone enclosure, but it does afford some degree of protection. If you want to upgrade your skin from Recon Specialist to Whiteout, well, caveat emptor, and be sure you're downloading the genuine article.