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CEO Catches Stranger After Hours, Prompting Espionage Charges (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Samuel Straface thought he was the last one out the door one recent evening at the medical-technology startup he leads in suburban Boston. But as he passed a glass-walled conference room on the second floor, Dr. Straface says he saw a man he didn't recognize, sitting by himself in front of two open laptops and a tablet device. He continued walking a few steps toward the exit, but then, feeling uneasy, he turned back (Editor's note: the submitted link could be paywalled; alternative source). The man was later identified as Dong Liu, a dual citizen of China and Canada. And his after-hours computing at Medrobotics is at the center of an economic-espionage case brought by U.S. prosecutors. Mr. Liu is in federal custody, charged with attempting to steal trade secrets and trying to gain unauthorized access to the company's computer system, prosecutors said. If convicted of both charges, he could face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. "Mr. Liu adamantly asserts his innocence and we fully expect he'll be exonerated after a careful review of the evidence," said Robert Goldstein, Mr. Liu's defense attorney. The U.S. attorney's office for the District of Massachusetts declined to comment on the case beyond details in court records. Before his arrest, police said Mr. Liu told them he was there to discuss doing business with the company -- but Dr. Straface says no one had scheduled a meeting with Mr. Liu.
China Bad!
"The man was later identified as Dong Liu, a dual citizen of China and Canada."
As a non-American this Dong is obviously a victim of racism -- which only exists in America -- and should be given an award for liberating information that wanted to be free from the clutches of evil racists like that CEO who DISCRIMINATED against Dong by using his brain.
You never discriminate against Dong.
[P.S. --> If that fucker had been a Russian then executing him on the spot and using it as indisputable proof that Trump committed treason in the election would be cool though. Xenophobia is only bad against some foreigners based on political convenience after all]
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
"Subscribe to read more!"
Yeah... no.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't understand why we have paywall-ed links on the front page.
I had a friend who worked for Pacific Gas & Electirc. With the uniform, badge, hardhat and clipboard, he could walk into any boarding to look at electrical closets and no one would question him. He even showed up at my job and I marched him off the property.
https://beta.theglobeandmail.c...
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
A couple of sources that aren't paywalled:
https://execsecurity.com/news/...
http://www.cetusnews.com/busin...
They will be less likely to cheat next time.
"Mr. Liu told them he was there to discuss doing business with the company..."
Yes. Obviously. Exactly like a fox goes into a hen house to "do business" with the chickens.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The article I found on it (not WSJ) didn't give a time but it sounds like it was fairly late, and this guy is sitting alone in a conference room with multiple devices downloading files from the corporate network. I don't think the "I was just there for a meeting" defense is going to go very far.
But I think it's pretty clear from some of the stories about Chinese espionage that the only way we can disincentivize civilians from doing stuff like this is to completely upend their existence. Ex charge this guy with economic espionage, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and whatever else, then throw everything from criminal trespass to theft of services (if he's on the company's network).
Honestly, if you are in a field that is competitive enough where others would want to copy your work, you should at least take the proper measures to ensure that somebody cannot just walk in the building and access your data. Your drives should be encrypted at the very least.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And it's all part of the new Cold War III we're in right now.
Security is a myth. Computer security doubly so.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This is just another case where Americans fail at being inclusive. Obama would never have gotten this guy arrested. The Chinese guy was just helping out an improverished nation, and how does it matter exactly if it was an adversarial nation? From a world perspective we are all sisters and brothers until the profit motive starts manipulating us. This is why we need government teeth to enforce eugenics and fight true evils like e-cigs and limit the population so only university professors and hip hop artists can be allowed to reproduce and elections are based on celebrity endorsements uncorrupted by petty things like improving the economy or letting people keep their own money. In a more collaborative environment we would be publishing our trade secrets in open source forums so poor guys like this don't have to travel all the way to America to get access to them. I have other good ideas too like asking these guys to take our jobs overseas.
They need to zip up their security. This clearly went beyond a yellow warning and into the red. Their IT security learning slope is a bit too steep, I think they have a chink in their physical armor.
Am I the only one who can foresee the best newspaper headline: "Chinese Dong caught 'doing business' behind Laptop" I'm just saying...
... PERFECT name for a porn-film body double.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
You cannot get dual citizenship with China. Is this article accurate/believable?
Looking at the title I read it as CEO was caught downloading "Stranger After Hours" as a TV show being leaked online.
The US needs to make China aware that this state sponsored economic terrorism will no longer be tolerated. I vote that every time there is a theft of US technology, we VOID $10 billion (minimum) of US treasuries held by China. Make it $50 billion if it is a military contractor. If they want to steal our technology, they are going to pay out the ass for it. If they run out of US debt, start putting a 1% tariff on all goods imported for a year, per incident. Watch companies start to flee China as the cost of producing goods there to import to the US skyrockets while the Chinese economy craters.
We cannot survive as a nation with the parasite of China continuously stealing our manufacturing, manipulating trade deficits and now stealing our technology. We either have to change or we are going to collapse.
And to all you globalists out there rooting for the US to fail, I hope you like living under a jack booted dictatorship with zero freedom and can speak Russian or Mandarin, because that is what will happen to you about 10 days after a US collapse.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Sneaking in at night and accessing multiple laptops leaves you massively exposed for a long period of time.
The smarter thief would leave a small innocuous device with cell phone access plugged into the network. Then access the device at leisure, and remove the next day or two. Better yet (obviously) is infect a PC with phone-home software. Then there's no physical device to remove.
This plan was just stupid.
(IMAGINE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL CAPS) We stayed overnight in a medical-technology startup! BIG MISTAKE... youtube.com/tfil
You got the wrong Liu, Mister. I was here to deliver some General Tso's spicy chicken. We have been using tablets and laptops for some time now, to reduce errors in delivery, and so on. I was told to bring the food up here in the conference room.
Source https://www.bostonglobe.com/me... (paywall link) (disclaimer, I work for The Boston Globe)...
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Another HIGHLY SKILLED immigrant brought to you by Stephen Harper's cash for citizenship whoring of Canada. BRILLIANT!
Fyi, If the second nationality is an economic citizenship then a Chinese citizen will not lose their original citizenship. Economic citizenships are available to purchase through many countries, even Canada.
"Also, Article 9 explicitly states that only Chinese nationals residing abroad who voluntarily acquires another country's citizenship shall be deemed as forfeiture of Chinese nationality. As a result, a Chinese national residing in China with no permanent residency in any foreign countries who obtains economic citizenship in another country does not lose Chinese nationality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
He's three sheets to the wind!
both links are paywalled... well done!
The problem here is that this is a state actor being caught out. The effective kinds of penalties in this situation would be tantamount to self harm. That is, the only thing that would stop China from doing this would be to cut economic ties with them. Of any kind. And that is literally cutting our nose off to spite our face. We and by this I mean the global community are tied too deeply to one another economically to try and isolate a nation as large and as prosperous as China currently is. It's also of dubious use as a way to change regimes. Look at N. Korea or Iran for examples. While Iran has seen some positive democratic reforms in the past decade, it was only after a certain amount of trade was normalized that it happened.
The only level one has left then is an individual one. To make it too costly for an individual to be caught to make it worthwhile. In order to make this effective, one would have to up regulations so that your own country's infrastructure and business practices are able to catch them. Which isn't going to happen while the current political regime reigns in DC. If anything, President Stupid is going to make it easier for this to happen for his Russian buddies who are busy doing the same thing China is doing, just in different industries.
The sword of Damocles works
your analogy fails, the sword of Damocles does not harm its owner
in this situation the falling sword kills both opponents
the market would just price in that risk and raise interest rates.
or better yet why not just avoid doing business with americans who can't even make proper analogies?
China currently owns about 5.5% of all US T-Bills which doesn't sound like a lot but it's roughly $1.1 Trillion (thousand-million). Voiding their debt would cause two problem:
Tanking the T-Bill market like this would also piss off Japan (as well as other allies) which is currently our strongest ally in that region of the world. Japan currently holds over 7% of US T-Bills (more than China) and if we deliberately took actions that would wipe out their investment they're going to be pissed. We do enough trade with them that this could also have serious repercussions.
So while this might seem like a good idea at first glance, it's not and would end up sparking an economic world war and economic wars have a way of turning into shooting ones (people tend to get angry when you screw with their finances).
Not a real good source of real news. Stop polluting your brain.
Am I the only one who keeps reading the CEO's name as Scarface? Because we know how that guy welcomes unexpected visitors, by introducing them to his little friend.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Is there an engineer here who can honestly say they've ever traveled with that full a panoply of recording media on them? Oh, wait, he wasn't an engineer either. He said he was a lawyer...
Whatever he was doing, it wasn't engineering as I know it, and he seemed almost comically concerned about being able to record data no matter what media hardware he bumped into on his trips (or even if none were accepted, he had camcorders).
Add to that his cover story when challenged involved name-dropping an out-of-town engineer, and then the CEO himself (the last was clearly a lie), and there aren't a lot of other conclusions one could come to.
You want to carry on your anti-PC diatribe based upon racism??
How about we make this simple for you. The Right likes to carry on about individual responsibility, and it's a defensible political philosophy, if a bit broadly applied. Anyhow.
Western democrats hold Russia, Russians, and Russian proxies responsible for their actions. Just like the Right would like, you would think, in accordance with right wing politics.
Except no. The Right has to deny that there was any Russian involvement at all, or they say the Russians didn't attack voting machines so it doesn't count, or they pretend that Donald Trump didn't encourage Russian hackers to hack more. Frankly I don't even know what field we're playing anymore because the Right has moved the goalposts so often. It's all about denying the truth because the truth doesn't look good. It doesn't look good on Trump and it doesn't look good on the Right.
Regardless of what your politics are, this was encouraging crime, encouraging a hostile foreign power, undermining democracy and encouraging a lack of accountability for actions. Actions by the hackers and actions by Trump.
Your attempt to link Russian hacking to racism just smacks of desperation, arrogance, or stupidity.
Something, something something, Trump had nothing to do with it. Something, something, Hillary is just mad, something, something, something, white power, something, something, Mexicans in our country, something, something, he was caught committing a crime and was rightfully arrested....oh yea something, something, white power.
I love it when they throw a shit load of nonsense in with one or two statements people will agree with. Too ez to control people nowadays
The CEOs who got paid well to sell out the company are almost as guilty as the Chinese.
It's right in line with a career building move for denizens of the C-suite (CEO, COO, CFO, CTO, ...) that is often attributed to the teachings of the Harvard Business School (though graduates of other business schools have also been seen to execute it). It works like this:
1. Join the company as the new, or turnaround, CEO (or whatever). Get a big package of stock options (a "free" leveraged investment that pays off drastically if, and only if, the stock price rises.)
2. Dump the R&D and other preparation for future products (and any personnel working on them). Perhaps also make some cuts in customer support for current products, cheapen the product, cut infrastructure maintenance, etc.. This drastically cuts expenses while not (initially) affecting revenue, boosting the "bottom line" of the financial statements.
3. Announce the big boost in profits at a few quarterly reports and the investor/financial media phone conferences. The stock price soars, as does the executives' reputation as a corporate administration wizard.
4. Select a successor (sucker), leave the company, and cash out the stock options. (PROFIT!) Of course cashing out when leaving is viewed as prudent, since the company will now be run by somebody else the way THEY feel like running it.
5. Rinse and repeat at your next company. Meanwhile, your successor is in charge, and catches the blame, when the house of cards collapses.
The scam depends on the benefits being immediate and the damages, though bigger, being delayed.
Moving production to China (or some other offshore sites), with its far lower costs but track record of expropriation of trade secrets (which takes a while to spin up into a competing product) has exactly the same structure.
Of course it's a breach of fiduciary duty for officers of a corporation to do this. But they can make it LOOK like they're being responsible by taking advantage of the drastically lower production prices to "maximize investor value".
Until enough investors catch on to this, and both the markets and stockholder meetings shift to make this a losing strategy for executives (or regulators pick up on it ditto), expect it to continue.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There aren't Chinese dual citizens. To become a citizen of another country implies giving up your Chinese citizenship.
This chinese guy is a security guru, he knows physical access to devices could defeat all security defences. /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow file so he can crack it on his leisure time.
Maybe he just wanted to instal a bitcoin miner, or probably download
This hacking trick was explained by Kevin Mitnick on one of his books, and his term for this is "tail gating" an emloyee during their cigarette break.
The backup link is also paywalled.