Rogue Social Media

China is Using LinkedIn to Recruit Informants
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ and MELISSA EDDY

The Chinese Embassy in Berlin on Monday. German intelligence services said that more than 10,000 German citizens had been targeted by Chinese spies on LinkedIn.

BEIJING — German’s domestic intelligence agency has accused China of using LinkedIn to infiltrate the German government.
In a scathing investigation released on Sunday, the intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, accused Beijing of using social media to target more than 10,000 citizens, including lawmakers and other government employees. 

To win their trust, the agency said, Chinese agents posed as leaders of think tanks and headhunters, and offered all-expenses-paid trips to China and meetings with influential clients.
The German investigation added to anxieties in Western countries about Chinese efforts to infiltrate foreign governments and businesses, in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage, especially on economic and foreign policy issues. 

The United States has accused China of rampant economic espionage. 

Australia is debating tougher laws to guard against foreign interference, amid reports that China is meddling in Australian universities and elections.
German officials said that Chinese agents had created fake profiles in hopes of “gleaning information and recruiting sources” in Germany. 

Chinese agents approached targets by saying they were interested in exchanging information or offering to establish contact for them with an expert on China, German officials said.

Hans-Georg Maassen, the president of the German intelligence agency, called the efforts “a broad attempt to infiltrate Parliaments, ministries and administrations.”
Adam M. Segal, an expert on cybersecurity and China at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the German investigation will add “more fuel to the fire of skepticism and suspicion about Chinese actions” in the West.
He said that China would probably continue to expand its digital espionage efforts despite criticism. “Given how sensitive the regime and Xi Jinping seems to be to any challenge domestically, they also want to try to control as much as they can internationally,” Mr. Segal said.

LinkedIn is one of few foreign social media companies operating in China, in part because it adheres closely to Chinese regulations and has a relatively warm relationship with the government.
Under the scheme described by German intelligence, Chinese agents used aliases like Eva Han on LinkedIn.

They used photographs from fashion magazines as their profile pictures. 

Several listed fake company names.
Once they established contact with German citizens, the Chinese agents intensified the attempted exchange, asking for a résumé and offering compensation for work on a project.

They invited Germans to China for conferences or meetings with “important clients” who never materialized. 

They pressed the targets for sensitive information in exchange for money.

The German government has repeatedly warned in recent months that China is increasing its efforts to steal trade secrets and other sensitive information from European targets.
In July, the government said that Chinese agents were seeking information about foreign and economic policy. 

It said China had targeted lawmakers and employees of the European and German Parliaments, lobbyists, members of the military and representatives of foundations and think tanks.

Is he a spy? Probably.

Linked In Spying

CHINA IS SPYING ON THE WEST USING LINKEDIN
BY ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON

Chinese spies nest.

China has denied using LinkedIn to infiltrate political and business circles in Germany, following claims from German intelligence services that 10,000 of its citizens were targeted by Chinese spies.
The German intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), made the allegations Sunday, suggesting that China was using fake profiles to connect with high-profile politicians and business leaders. 

The claims follow similar allegations of cyber espionage being undertaken by Russian spy agencies.
“Chinese intelligence services are active on networks like LinkedIn and have been trying for a while to extract information and find intelligence sources in this way,” said a spokesperson for Germany’s BfV intelligence agency.
“The infections are difficult to detect, since network connections between service providers and their customers aren’t suspicious. This gives the attacker an even better disguise than before.”
The method of infiltration that Chinese operatives used, according to the BfV, was to pose as academics, business consultants and policy experts on the business networking site. 

The BfV published the names of eight of the profiles it claimed were set up for the purpose of surveillance and infiltration, adding that it suspected there were many more.
One example of a suspicious account was that of Laeticia Chen, whose profile stated she was a manager at the “China Center of International Politics and Economy.” 

There was no evidence that Chen is a real person and her profile picture was borrowed from an online fashion catalogue, the intelligence agency said, according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
The BfV feared that these accounts were used to contact relevant German nationals for the purpose of gathering information and to recruit informants.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to the allegations on Monday, December 11, saying that such claims were damaging to relations between the two countries.
Earlier this year, Russian intelligence services came under scrutiny for their manipulation of LinkedIn as a surveillance tool, as well as their widely reported use of bots across other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
The attraction of LinkedIn as a spying platform is that its users are predominantly white-collar workers in positions that could be exploited at high levels of business and government.
“The Russian special services are for sure exploiting LinkedIn to gather personal information on certain targets and possibly recruit and blackmail them,” a Kremlin expert told Newsweek in August. “They operate under fabricated identities and credentials, while Russian propaganda and trolling campaigns are widely applied on the platform.”