China reporters told to guard inboxes

Beijing-based reporters covering the debates over Google, censorship, and email security are now being cautioned to watch their own inboxes. According to an alert posted today by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China: Malicious email attachments sent to foreign correspondents in China tend to increase around big news events and sensitive political dates … the ...

Beijing-based reporters covering the debates over Google, censorship, and email security are now being cautioned to watch their own inboxes. According to an alert posted today by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China:

Beijing-based reporters covering the debates over Google, censorship, and email security are now being cautioned to watch their own inboxes. According to an alert posted today by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China:

Malicious email attachments sent to foreign correspondents in China tend to increase around big news events and sensitive political dates … the overall volume of malware messages sent to foreign correspondents appears to have grown this week.

Whether the timing of the email malware attacks on reporters is related to recent events involving Google or not  is unclear. So far at least three Beijing reporters have received emails with malicious software that appeared to come from the Shanghai Expo’s media affairs office. In fact, the emails came from a different address, but some speculate the users may have been using the press list collected by Shanghai Expo.

In addition to concerns over security and privacy, I’m wondering whether the Expo folks were complicit — or are now thinking, "Yee-gawds, why our email list, this is the last thing we need as we try to win over those reporters."

(Of course, it’s not as though the U.S. Pavilion at the Expo has run a seemless public diplomacy operation either, as Adam Minter’s reporting reveals.)

Christina Larson is an award-winning foreign correspondent and science journalist based in Beijing, and a former Foreign Policy editor. She has reported from nearly a dozen countries in Asia. Her features have appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Science, Scientific American, the Atlantic, and other publications. In 2016, she won the Overseas Press Club of America’s Morton Frank Award for international magazine writing. Twitter: @larsonchristina
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