Germany’s top boss for cyber security didn’t really want to get out with the language when he was asked a few days ago about the upcoming trip to China by the German Olympic delegation.
Sure, his Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) advised the German Olympic Sports Confederation about the upcoming trip, said Arne Schönbohm, the BSI President, but it should be understood that he does not want to give any specific information about China or the advice: “Whatever we would say and communicate publicly, of course, also serves the attackers.”
Just don’t take any sensitive data with you
And obviously there are plenty of those in China. For this reason, many other nations besides Germany have advised their Olympic riders not to take any sensitive data with them and, if possible, to use disposable cell phones and discarded laptops. Numerous media representatives avoid their local editorial networks and work on hardware that will be disposed of after the China trip.
In contrast to his German colleague, a leading representative of the relevant US security agency does not mince his words: “China is second to none”says Rob Joyce, director for National Security Agency Cybersecurity: “In terms of the number of cyber actors, China surpasses all of the rest of the world combined.”
Silence when it comes to China
Because an interview request has not yet been answered, we had to dem BSI-President Schönbohm the questions in a press conference IT-Security Congress. Schönbohm reports to the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
And the German government has been remarkably dodgy in all public statements on Beijing’s propaganda games, so that one could not help feeling that the fact that China has now been Germany’s most important trading partner for five years in a row is keeping many German politicians silent.
App with spying capabilities
Schönbohm’s authority would have to play a key role in protecting the German Olympic team, because in addition to the pandemic threats, data attacks also pose a major risk in China. This was discovered even before the games, when Olympic travelers from all over the world had to download a Chinese app , which was officially supposed to serve virological precautions by collecting health data.
But the Olympic app My2022 according to its programming, it can do much more. She also has a chat feature to communicate. Chat monitoring can be activated if required. Experts from the renowned CitizenLab from the University of Toronto discovered when analyzing the app that terms such as “Tibet”, “Uyghur” or “Tiananmen Square” that are sensitive to China can be found and blocked.
The Citizen Lab report also states that the app can “Not only violating Google and Apple’s software rules, but also China’s own laws.” And their security measures are “totally inadequate to prevent sensitive data from being made available to unauthorized third parties”.