The German Intelligence Agency (BfV) is blaming Chinese Intelligence agencies for spying on them. BfV says that Chinese agencies are making fake profiles on LinkedIn to gather information on German officials and politicians. The agency blames that the Chinese have used the social networking site to target about 10,000 Germans and probably want to recruit them as their informants.
BfV claims that Chinese Intel has released a number of fake profiles allegedly used to infiltrate in the high officials of the German Government. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of BfV has claimed that China’s intelligence agents disguised as consultants or researchers are working through social networking sites especially LinkedIn to target the high officials.
Maassen told, “This is a broad-based attempt to infiltrate in particular parliaments, ministries, and government agencies. The infections are difficult to detect since network connections between service providers and their customers aren’t suspicious. This gives the attacker an even better disguise than before.”
BfV has further added that the China’s Intel Agencies are imitating approaches of other organizations like Association France Euro-Chine and Global View Strategic Consulting. Those German users who thought that they were attacked or targeted are requested by authorities to contact the BfV. The major reason for worry for the Germans is that the Chinese Intelligence are using this method to recruit high ranked politicians as informants.
China has denied the allegation of cyber espionage, and has not responded to the German allegations yet. It looks like the Chinese are quite ahead in cyber-spying and online theft as this comes after the news of ATM skimming in Pakistan, where citizens of China were found involved.