Sounds just like Russia…and China has an army that is assigned to keep up the espionage against the West.

Red astroturf: Chinese government makes millions of fake social media posts

“50-cent” posters aim to distract from dissent rather than confront it.

arsT: Data scientists at Harvard University have found that the government of the People’s Republic of China generates an estimated 448 million fake social media posts per year. The posts are an effort to shape online conversations by citizens and to distract them from sensitive topics “and change the subject”—largely through “cheerleading” posts promoting the Chinese Communist Party and the government.

The research, conducted by Harvard professor Gary King and former Harvard graduate students Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts and supported by Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Science, made use of a goldmine of propaganda content. This included a leaked archive of e-mails sent to the Zhanggong District Internet Propaganda Office from 2013 to 2014 that showed government workers’ documentation of completion of fake post work, including screen shots. The research also analyzed social media posts on Chinese websites from 2010 to 2015.

Previously, posts like these were believed to be the work of what observers have called the “50-cent Party”—named for what some believed the posters are paid by the state for their propaganda work. As it turns out, the posts analyzed by King and his co-researchers were likely mostly written for free as an extra duty of government employees.

And while the “50c” posts had long been assumed to be focused on attacking critics of the government and the Party, the researchers found instead that “the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We infer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime.” In essence, the fake posts are a government-sponsored “astro-turfing” campaign—an attempt to create the impression of a grassroots groundswell of support for the Party and the government.

The term “astro-turfing” first became widely used  to online public relations efforts by Microsoft as the company was fighting a government anti-trust case through the Microsoft-funded group Americans for Technology Leadership, though the term had been used in the past to describe off-line fake grassroots efforts. It has become a common (but unethical) political and marketing practice—particularly as companies try to shape online reviews and comments about their products and services. But none has engaged in this practice on the scale of the Chinese government’s campaign, which used government workers to spread happy talk about the Party and state. Of the posts analyzed from the Zhanggong archive, the researchers found 99.3 percent were contributed by one of more than 200 government agencies. Twenty percent of those posts were posted directly by employees of the Zhanggong Internet Propaganda Office, with smaller percentages coming from other regional and municipal government agencies.

As for the allegation that these astroturfers get paid by the government for their posts, the researchers noted, “no evidence exists that the authors of 50c posts are even paid extra for this work. We cannot be sure of current practices in the absence of evidence but, given that they already hold government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) jobs, we would guess this activity is a requirement of their existing job or at least rewarded in performance reviews.”

Yup, there is more….

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Defence forces on alert after Chinese cyber attack

TheNewIndianExpress: An alert has been issued to the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force that a Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group called Suckfly, based in Chengdu region, is targeting Indian organisations. India’s defence establishment is its prime target.

Suckfly is involved in carrying out cyber espionage activities by sending out a malware called Nidiran.

According to the alert, Suckfly has stolen certificates from legitimate software developing firms in South Korea and is using them to camouflage its attacks. “Sensitive information from targeting computers and networks is exfiltrated, and this information is being used to undermine the national security and economic capabilities,” the alert issued from the Ministry of Defence states.

APT is a network attack in which an unauthorised person gains access and stays there undetected for a long period of time. The intention of an APT attack is to steal data instead of causing damage to the network or organisation.

“It has successfully carried out cyber espionage by infecting computers of both government and commercial houses of India involved in e-commerce, finance, healthcare, shipping and technology. Targeting of military personnel cannot be ruled out, keeping in mind the sensitive nature of data being handled by them,” the alert adds.

What is alarming for security agencies is that the cyber attack was carried out from the headquarters of China’s People’s Liberation Army. Chengdu Military Command is in charge of security along India’s eastern sector in the Tibet region, including Arunachal Pradesh. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had visited Chengdu Military Command during his visit to Beijing in April.