China warns office workers that foreign spies could steal data via widely available online software

“Many internet platforms have accumulated powerful ‘dark technology’ features that combine social and office functions,” the ministry said on its official WeChat account on Sunday.

Examples of risky applications include tools for instant communication, format conversion, file transfer, and group discussions.

The ministry said uploading confidential files to these platforms increases the risk of confidential data being “theft” by “foreign spy and intelligence agencies” and should be “strictly prohibited.”

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AND a similar call In June, a notice about file transfer tools was sent out to government officials and employees, and last month a major Chinese tech company announced it was suspending the operation of a file storage and transfer tool.

The ministry singled out a type of product called File Transfer Assistant, which bears the same name as a file backup service offered by Tencent’s WeChat that allows users to send files to themselves.

The ministry said that when employees upload secret documents from their personal devices to cloud storage systems such as File Transfer Assistant, it “significantly increases the risk of overseas espionage and intelligence agencies obtaining sensitive documents using Trojan viruses.”

“A data transfer software company can easily access confidential documents, but cannot effectively control the scope of access, which can easily lead to information leakage,” the release reads.

He also warned that there was a risk of information leakage when using optical character recognition software to extract text from images in confidential files and when entering confidential information to generate text in AI software.

A month later, Tencent suspended all file uploads to its other cloud service, WeCloud, and said it would shut down operations in October due to “corporate restructuring.”

The announcement on Tencent’s WeCloud website urged customers to back up their files and said that subscribers to the service would be refunded.

The application regularly reminds users that it is prohibited to post confidential content when transmitting data to the system.

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The ministry’s appeal is part of a broader campaign by China to protect information amid technological rivalry and geopolitical tensions with the United States.

Another Chinese government department, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, published testing rules in May for industrial and IT companies to conduct data security risk assessments, China lags behind the West on data protection.

The activities also include a thorough reconstruction of the broadly defined law on state secrets for a “new era” in which the scope of information covered by secrecy has been expanded to include “professional secrets” – those that are not state secrets but “could cause certain negative consequences in the event of a leak.”

The Ministry of State Security has appointed WeChat page last July to deflect Western criticism of its national security efforts and engage the public in counterintelligence activities.