I said I would start writing and then went a year without doing so. Let’s give this another try.
When I first came to China a year ago I had the same Western focused perspective as most of the people I have met in the cyber security field. I was expecting to walk into a place that was threatening from a cyber security perspective. Needless to say I was surprised to see that my firewall and email filters were generating very little noise (or signal) from the local Chinese network. I quickly had to adjust to this new reality and dig deeper into why I wasn’t seeing the same types of attacks happening within China as I saw in the US. I’ll dig into this more in the next few days as I cover a few topics including how integral cellphones and apps like WeChat are within China. I’ll also take some time to reflect on the level of monitoring I see on a daily basis from street cameras to facial scans.