The other day in the Times it was reported that Rolls-Royce and Royal Dutch Shell had fallen foul of Chinese espionage attacks. A few days earlier the Times also ran an exclusive about how MI5 were aware that China were waging a cyberwar against the West.Imagine my surprise then when I discovered in my referer logs that someone had emailed this post about HMRC recruiting for security analysts to a Gmail account which was open in Hanoi, Vietnam, by someone working at the Communist state-owned former Science and Technology Ministry now known as the The Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technology.
Let us hope that either the Vietnamese Communists are being used as a benign proxy, or that HMRC have full-scale security vetting of applicants. Otherwise the loss of 25 million data records may become small fry compared to state secrets about the Revenue and Customs systems of the UK.
3 comments:
The West has a benign view of business deriving from the Enlightenment (although the selfishness of entrepreneurs could do with updating into the secular age. It is no longer necessary to cast entrepreneurs as particularly selfish people, but as highly imaginative, low boredom threshold, initiators), which sees trade as a way for more people to experience happier lives.
China and other centralised bureaucracies see business and trade as an extension of the strategic interests of their nation, as a way to become more powerful.
They want to benefit from markets but fundamentally don't believe in them in the same way that we do.
What was it the Polish pre-perestroika politician said. 'With capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.' They are centuries away from an enlightened view of the world.
They are just happy that at last they are learning to compete with the foreign devils.
I'm thinking of opening a new corner shop, "The Great Chinese Takeaway".
I used to work for a large UK 'high street' financial services company.
The attempts to 'plant' dodgy people on the inside to perpetrate fraud did not stop.
One incident even referred to getting a relatively 'clean' person to apply for a job, and if he/she got the job, they wouldn't turn up on the starting day, but be replaced by a crook who would then have access to a secure environment - it was a constant battle to keep one step of the criminals.
I am no Sherlock Holmes, but I would be willing to bet, after recent events, that HMRC are a lot worse than a 'big four bank' when it comes to managing risk and fraud prevention.
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