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Daily Archives: December 30, 2020

China pushes Alibaba founder Jack Ma to downsize his finance business Ant Group

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China’s crackdown on Jack Ma’s empire is far from over: The country’s regulators have ordered the Ma-founded Alibaba affiliate Ant Group to scale down its business. In particular, they’ve ordered the company to “return to its origins” as a payment provider. Ant Group started out as Alipay, which became China’s largest digital payment platform, though it eventually expanded to offer investment and savings accounts, as well as lending, insurance and wealth management services. Pan Gongsheng, the deputy governor of China’s central bank, called those services “illegal” and said the company must “strictly rectify” those activities. As The Guardian noted, those services are the group’s most profitable and fastest-growing divisions.

Gongsheng listed all the steps Ant Group are required to take as ordered by Chinese regulators in a release posted on the bank’s official website. Those requirements include prohibiting unfair competition, improving corporate governance and ensuring everything it does is “in accordance with the law.” As for the company, it told The Guardian in a statement that it would form a “rectification working group” to implement those requirements. A spokesperson explained:

“We will enlarge the scope and magnitude of opening up for win-win collaboration, review and rectify our work in consumer rights protection, and comprehensively improve our business compliance and sense of social responsibility. Ant will make its rectification plan and working timetable in a timely manner and seek regulators’ guidance in the process.”

Back in November, Chinese regulators blocked Ant’s planned IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which was expected to raise $34 billion. Authorities also introduced new draft laws to oversee tech companies’ data collecting activities, along with other rules they say are meant to protect consumers. And just a few days ago, regulators opened an investigation into Alibaba’s “suspected monopolistic conduct.”

Ma’s businesses seem to have become a target after he called Chinese banks state-owned “pawnshops” for handing out unnecessary loans at a finance summit in Shanghai in October. According to Bloomberg, his companies have been in crisis mode since then and his executives even formed a task force to deal with government watchdogs on a daily basis.

Source: China pushes Alibaba founder Jack Ma to downsize his finance business | Engadget

Korean artificial sun sets the new world record of 20-sec-long operation at 100 million degrees

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The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees (Celsius).

On November 24 (Tuesday), the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announced that in a joint research with the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States, it succeeded in continuous operation of for 20 seconds with an ion- higher than 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the 2020 KSTAR Plasma Campaign.

It is an achievement to extend the 8 second plasma operation time during the 2019 KSTAR Plasma Campaign by more than 2 times. In its 2018 experiment, the KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: about 1.5 seconds).

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The KSTAR began operating the device last August and plans to continue its plasma generation experiment until December 10, conducting a total of 110 plasma experiments that include high-performance plasma operation and plasma disruption mitigation experiments, which are joint research experiments with domestic and overseas research organizations.

In addition to the success in high temperature plasma operation, the KSTAR Research Center conducts experiments on a variety of topics, including ITER researches, designed to solve complex problems in fusion research during the remainder of the experiment period.

The KSTAR is going to share its key experiment outcomes in 2020 including this success with fusion researchers across the world in the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference which will be held in May.

Source: Korean artificial sun sets the new world record of 20-sec-long operation at 100 million degrees

Vietnam targeted in complex supply chain attack through CA

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A group of mysterious hackers has carried out a clever supply chain attack against Vietnamese private companies and government agencies by inserting malware inside an official government software toolkit.

The attack, discovered by security firm ESET and detailed in a report named “Operation SignSight,” targeted the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA), the government organization that issues digital certificates that can be used to electronically sign official documents.

Any Vietnamese citizen, private company, and even other government agency that wants to submit files to the Vietnamese government must sign their documents with a VGCA-compatible digital certificate.

The VGCA doesn’t only issue these digital certificates but also provides ready-made and user-friendly “client apps” that citizens, private companies, and government workers can install on their computers and automate the process of signing a document.

But ESET says that sometime this year, hackers broke into the agency’s website, located at ca.gov.vn, and inserted malware inside two of the VGCA client apps offered for download on the site.

The two files were 32-bit (gca01-client-v2-x32-8.3.msi) and 64-bit (gca01-client-v2-x64-8.3.msi) client apps for Windows users.

ESET says that between July 23 and August 5, this year, the two files contained a backdoor trojan named PhantomNet, also known as Smanager.

The malware wasn’t very complex but was merely a wireframe for more potent plugins, researchers said.

Known plugins included the functionality to retrieve proxy settings in order to bypass corporate firewalls and the ability to download and run other (malicious) apps.

The security firm believes the backdoor was used for reconnaissance prior to a more complex attack against selected targets.

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PantomNet victims also discovered in the Philippines

ESET said that it also found victims infected with the PhantomNet backdoor in the Philippines but was unable to say how these users got infected. Another delivery mechanism is suspected.

The Slovak security firm didn’t formally attribute the attack to any particular group, but previous reports linked the PhatomNet (Smanager) malware to Chinese state-sponsored cyber-espionage activities.

The VGCA incident marks the fifth major supply chain attack this year after the likes of:

  • SolarWinds – Russian hackers compromised the update mechanism of the SolarWinds Orion app and infected the internal networks of thousands of companies across the glove with the Sunburst malware.
  • Able Desktop – Chinese hackers have compromised the update mechanism of a chat app used by hundreds of Mongolian government agencies.
  • GoldenSpy – A Chinese bank had been forcing foreign companies activating in China to install a backdoored tax software toolkit.
  • Wizvera VeraPort – North Korean hackers compromised the Wizvera VeraPort system to deliver malware to South Korean users.

Source: Vietnam targeted in complex supply chain attack | ZDNet