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Canada China Privacy Security

China, Canada Vow Not To Conduct Cyberattacks On Private Sector (reuters.com) 52

New submitter tychoS writes from a report via Reuters: China and Canada have signed an agreement vowing not to conduct state-sponsored cyberattacks against each other aimed at stealing trade secrets or other confidential business information. The new agreement was reached during talks between Canada's national security and intelligence adviser, Daniel Jean, and senior communist party official Wang Yongqing, a statement dated June 22 on the Canadian government's website showed. "This is something that three or four years ago (Beijing) would not even have entertained in the conversation," an unnamed Canadian government official told the Globe and Mail, which first reported the agreement. The new agreement only covers economic cyber-espionage, which includes hacking corporate secrets and proprietary technology, but does not deal with state-sponsored cyber spying for intelligence gathering.
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China, Canada Vow Not To Conduct Cyberattacks On Private Sector

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  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @08:54PM (#54695513)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Anonymous Coward

      The problem is with this sort of agreement, is that everyone assumes it doesn't work, but no one notices when it does.

      When Obama signed a cyber espionage agreement with China during his presidency everyone said the same thing, but he did so shortly after the US had issued indictments for a number of top Chinese military officials assigned to hacking duties - it wasn't until afterwards that it turned out that the photos used in those indictments were personal images taken from each of those officials persona

    • Multinationals are taking patent infringement claims to Chinese courts now. I think they may have finished stealing their way to parity and now find themselves needing to actually protect IP in general in order to protect theirs in particular.

      But I could be wrong.

  • Gut feeling says that the treaty says that the Chinese gov will not crack Canada's systems.
    However, China will continue to crack all nation's computers.
    They will simply outsource it to citizens and pay them for doing it.
    • "China and Canada have signed an agreement vowing not to conduct state-sponsored cyber attacks against each other."

      Yes, there's the loophole. They can just follow the Russian example and say it's not us, where's the proof, it's all MSM lies and you can't trust your intelligence agencies after Iraq.

      It's not as if anyone ever owns up with, "Yes, we stole the plans for your new jet, but it's OK, we're state-sponsored."

      Also, if there are any state-sponsored hackers reading this, do you get free stuff with your

    • "State-sponsored" already means the government outsourcing it to citizens and paying for it, so the treaty is saying they won't do that. Of course it's quite possible China will break the treaty. But if Canada already planned to not hack Chinese companies for economic espionage, then what do they have to lose from the treaty? Nothing.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Much more detail here https://www.theglobeandmail.co... [theglobeandmail.com]. So an agreement by both governments not to hack each others corporate networks but government networks are still all right to hack and of course us nobodies, well, fuck the nobodies, hack away.

      Pretty fucking shitty agreement Canada, fuck you. Next time there is an agreement, how about fucking people come first for a a fucking change instead of fucking corporations, fucking hell.

      • by Altrag ( 195300 )

        Almost by definition, us "nobodies" aren't worth hacking. We're not talking about botnets and ransomware here. We're talking about dedicated efforts to steal or damage critical (or at least very valuable) information.

        In this case, there's absolutely no reason to "put people first." Why would they go to the trouble of international negotiations to stop hacking against targets that wouldn't be getting hacked anyway? Or at least not hacked in the way that this agreement would be attempting to prevent.

  • it was copyright infringement.
  • by Mhrmnhrm ( 263196 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @09:50PM (#54695721)

    Myself I’d trust him to the end of the earth.

    Yes but how far is that?

    About twelve minutes away. Come on I need a drink

  • Chinese companies have plenty of money so they can just come in and buy up pretty much any company they want. There are very few companies that the government would prevent a foreign company from buying except for certain sectors such as banking, airlines, telecom, and media. I wish the Chinese would buy up Bombardier because I'm tired of them always asking for more government assistance and then cutting jobs.

  • If I understand correctly, the agreement does not ban state sponsored cyberattack against state. This is a bit weird.
    • by Altrag ( 195300 )

      While I agree its weird, it probably benefits us as much or possibly more than it benefits them. Canada certainly isn't irrelevant on the world stage, but nor are we exactly a superpower that would be any sort of a threat to China. So Canada would have limited usefulness as a target to be hacked.

      On the other hand, while we may ourselves not have much reason to hack China (again, what would we do with the information we gleaned? Threaten them?) But we have a neighbor we're pretty friendly with who would

      • by Blymie ( 231220 )

        Erm.

        NATO. Shared military secrets. Any planes / high tech military hardware we buy, come with full specs on how to repair. Learn how to hack our planes, you learn how to hack allies' planes.

        GoC contracts. Shared military drills. Military defense plans for NATO / North America. Outcomes of war games, war simulations, shared with all allies. Studies and tests on munitions, nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. (Yes, we do this, we simulate this).

        There's *tonnes* to obtain through state to state ha

  • How does this affect AMD? ATI was a Canadian company till AMD bought it, and they still design GPUs there. Can China still go after AMD's HQ in California, just so long as they stay in the US based systems?
  • In 2004, it was discovered that crackers ... gained almost complete access to Nortel's systems. Thought to have originated in 2000, for nearly ten years they accessed documents including emails, technical papers, research, development reports, and business plans. ... The Wall Street Journal reports that hackers working from Chinese IP addresses used seven passwords of Nortel executives, including a former CEO, to penetrate networks owned by the company.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel/ [wikipedia.org]

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