Marc Hofer

@marchofer.bsky.social

Journalist ,former East-Africa and Middle East and a few years China. Ex SkyNews, Ex ITV. A few wars, a little bit of “cybersec and China” and other things.

1/ New from me: Chinese diplomats scrambled up to 90 min before the Xi/Trump visit to the National Archives to stop a Taiwan-related treaty from being shown. ..."an indication of pushback from within the U.S. government against President Trump's warm reception of Xi.." www.npr.org/2026/09/29/n...

Potential Taiwan tension sparked 'last minute' change in Trump-Xi National Archives visit

The sudden change was precipitated because of Chinese displeasure over one document that the U.S. had planned to show.

npr.org

How good is China's own cyber defense when it comes to government owned infrastructure you might ask yourself at times !? Well, thanks to a hack of an extensive cyber defense drill for the province of Qinghai, we know more. 1/4

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Ecuadorean fishermen say drones attacked them in the Pacific — English-speaking men in US-flag uniforms, no insignia. 8 missing, several injured. Flight data shows a patrol plane shifting course to stay pointed at all 3 boats. It's on no Pentagon roll, registered to a UPS store mailbox in Virginia.

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Brief access to an unsecured dashboard that showed the live orchestration of a framework to set up ‘water hole attacks’ via Coruna/Darksword exploit-chains, demonstrates how this powerful spy tool is now cleary part of the mass-cyber-crime ecosystem. 1/3

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Surfilter, a Chinese company building hardware firewall systems mainly for the government, had it's firmware binary leaked. A selectionof all the VPNs the system is able to fingerprint ( among many others ) 1/2 : AnyViewer Clash ProtonVPN Tunnelbear TurboVPN V2Ray (and V2RayN) Windscribe …

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We got our hand on a Chinese DLP program the government and national security agencies use to monitor state employees computers for leakage and usage of confidential documents. Meet 保密管理系统. 1/9

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An example of an HikVision powered neighborhood surveillance and access-control system, that you can find all across China's cities. In the past often stand-alone, they are increasingly getting integrated into the nation wide "Sharp eyes" ( 雪亮 ) project.

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Internal documents from a Chinese cyber security company reveal how the Ministry of Public Security is commissioning “cyber ranges” to explore attack methods against adversaries digital critical infrastructure: open.substack.com/pub/netaskar...

Critical strike: China's hacking training grounds (PART 1)

Exclusive internal design documents reveal details of China's digital training grounds, set up to attack critical infrastructure of its "major adversaries".

open.substack.com