China has been accused many times of interfering in people's privacy using various surveillance systems . However , according to a report by Vice, the surveillance methods it uses have gone to another level
According to the report, Chinese border guards are forcing tourists to install software on phones that is actually malware .It is designed to copy messages and contacts and scan phones to gain access to documents and other data that tourists have on their phones.
This practice is not used in all regions. However, it is practiced in several and the Chinese government certainly approves of it.
For example, several tourists have reported such incidents upon entering the Xinjiang region, home to the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim community living in China.
The Chinese government has never been friendly to the Uighurs and has been trying to monitor their every move for decades. The new malware , called BXAQ or Fengcai, may be aimed at monitoring Uighurs and anyone who sympathizes with them and visits the region.
Xinjiang's borders are heavily controlled and there are many securityin place. Part of the control process is to give your mobile phone for a brief search.
Vice sent the malware to security firms for analysis. The results showed that it is not software that exploits potential security issues on the phone. What it does is copy a huge amount of data from the phone and send it to servers in China.
The Fengcai malware is essentially an app Android and requests several permissions to access a lot of personal data.
Guards install the application bypassing several layers of protection, which are in place by default, to prevent accidental installation of unverified applications.
Immediately after installation, the application sends the messaging history , contacts, calendar entries, and even account credentials to the server.
After copying the data, the software then scans the phone for more than 70,000 documents. It looks for everything from extremist Islamic material to simple innocuous things like the Quran. It scans for anything that could be useful or dangerous to China.
The application of course provides the option to uninstall, but certainly, when this is done, the data copying and scanning process is complete.
As we said above, this practice is not used in all parts of China, but we wouldn't be surprised if it were slowly implemented everywhere.
