In December 2021, Chinese company, Huawei, offered Oxford University students £15,000 ($AU 28,500) to see if they could 'solve' "challenges relating to the surveillance and tracking of devices and their users". Huawei actually called it a 'hackathon'.

The request was passed on to data science students by the university's career services section. When asked about the appropriateness of this offer, they replied that they offered an 'impartial service'. It was up to students to decide if they wanted to take it up!

This offer comes from a company, banned in the UK - and Australia - for cyber security reasons and its close links to the Chinese Communist Party; one which brazenly trawls for information in Western countries with few or no questions asked.

The author reporting this, Ian Williams, also reveals Chinese hackers penetrating a US oil company's data by infecting the online menu of the local Chinese restaurant's online menu used by the company's systems engineers for their takeaways.

Chinese hacking of the West is "breathtaking". The loss of American intellectual and industrial property, for instance, is described as "the greatest transfer of wealth in history".

Beijing's work with criminal gangs is affecting "thousands of companies and public sector organisations worldwide" - including Australia.

I'm not sure what can be done about hackers who
are so computer literate and can get around and into
anything. I'm not that familiar with ultra-safe
security devices )and how safe they really are?) that
can be put in place. How safe are our national security
bases and information - not only the information on
business organisational computers?

If they can hack information - then surely there must
be ways and means to protect it?

So ttbn is at it again: talking about subjects that he has no idea about and has not spent the slightest time to research.

The word "hack" to a computer programmer and to the general public use to mean two different things. Traditionally (and until quite recently), to a programmer "hack" just means to write inventive computer code while to the general public it commonly is associated with breaking into computers. From the programer's original meaning of "hack" comes the meaning of the word "hackathon" (its a portmanteau of "hack" and "marathon")- which is a just an event where programmers come together, usually as a recreative social event, to program collectively and solve problems. They are extremely common in the open source software world. Indeed, if you have smartphone (either apple or android) then bits of its software are the result of hackathons (aka: hackfests, codefests).

Now, there is a particular type of public hackathon that concentrates on computer security where the programmers try to crack into computer systems. The computer systems they are targeting are typically donated by some tech firm. One of the most famous of these is the Pwn2Own* contest where the person/team to first successfully crack into a target system gets to keep it and/or some monetary reward. If I remember correctly over the years it has been sponsored by the likes of Google, Trendmirco, Microsoft and others.

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So what's the point of these public cracking contests? It is to IMPROVE computer security and INCREASE awareness of computer security issues generally. It achieves this because it:
1) brings to light existing currently exploitable security flaws which the responsible software companies can release updates for
2) it shames software companies for writing such rubbish software in the first place
3) brings to light current general trends and methods of crackers from the murky dark of the world of cracking
4) raises general public awareness about just how abysmal the current accepted standards for computer security/coding competency are and that the general public should be very, very, careful with their computers/technology (which they're not!)

[*: Pwn2Own basically translates to "crack this machine to own it"- this crazy style of writing is known as "leet speak" in coding circles. Indeed, leet-speak itself is often self-referentially written "1337 5p34k". What I use to find so amazing about this contest is how fast the systems were cracked- but these days I take it as a given that they will be cracked]

Anyone who purchases (myself included through no choice due to Aust unions sanctioned by greedy, selfish everyday employees devastating our industries) Chinese made goods, imports spyware & facilitates hacking !
Just think, why would China not take advantage of of others mindlessness to make themselves so depended on Chinese products ? I couldn't think of one reason why micro/nano chips would not be in every single device that can accept them.

All countries probably indulge in cyber espionage in the name of security. But Communist China is also a common thief, stealing commercial secrets worth billions to them, and saving billions more by not doing their own research. Communist China is a commercial imperialist; it doesn’t view trade and industry the way the West does. It should never have been allowed into the WTO, and would not have been without the greed of Western industrialists who were stupid enough to think trade was going to democratise and civilise a bunch of Communist homicidal maniacs.

What can be done about it? Not much, I'm afraid. Technology brings us as many problems as it does advantages.

I'm not going to bother wading through tab's great slab of over over-wordiness on how wrong I am. He has revealed his idiocy often enough. He is like Channel 72: old reruns on a loop.