On Friday, senior analyst from the U.S. think tank “Foundation for Defense of Democracies” (FDD) warned in an article that while the United States is focused on countering Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cyber espionage activities, suspicious consulting websites continue to target Western security experts for potential enticement.
The warning stemmed from a recent post by a China expert on social media. On June 30, China expert Bill Hayton publicly questioned on social media whether a geopolitical consulting company based in Singapore recruiting Western security analysts could be a front organization for CCP intelligence agencies. This inquiry led the FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) to uncover a broader network of suspicious consulting websites.
Less than a month prior, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down 13 counterfeit consulting and nonprofit organization websites. According to the FBI’s assessment, these websites had been used by CCP intelligence agencies to recruit U.S. individuals holding national security clearances.
The newly discovered websites were all registered this year, showing similar characteristics and operational patterns, indicating that Beijing is likely continuing to employ this strategy and there is no sign of it slowing down.
CCTI reviewed a website marked as suspicious by Hayton, ieass.com, and found that its infrastructure and registration mode were almost identical to two other websites that also claimed to be geopolitical consulting companies – easi-policy.com and sgas-strategy.com. These three websites did not mention any association with each other.
The fourth website, northriver-asia.org, shared some technical tags with the aforementioned websites and exhibited the most obvious signs of falsification. Notably, its webpage accidentally included Simplified Chinese characters.
Of note, these four websites were registered in March, May, and June of this year.
While concrete evidence linking these websites directly to CCP intelligence agencies has not been found, their background information and operational patterns align with a well-known CCP espionage tactic. This tactic involves setting up fictitious consulting companies and think tanks in Singapore to engage Western analysts online, offering paid “research” opportunities and gradually extracting non-public information.
Ten years ago, Singaporean Dickson Yeo established a similar front company openly recruiting intelligence assets on the global professional social networking site LinkedIn. According to a previous case uncovered by CCTI, CCP’s intelligence operations targeted recently dismissed U.S. federal employees.
In May of this year, a self-proclaimed Singaporean consulting advisor reportedly promised $10,000 to staff of the “Congressional Executive Commission on China” in exchange for their work and information related to U.S. foreign policy.
Last month, the FBI shut down multiple websites engaged in similar espionage activities. Prior to this action, the “Five Eyes Alliance” issued an intelligence alert warning that CCP was targeting security clearance holders of its allied countries through fraudulent job postings.
The article suggests that Washington should encourage the combination of publicly available information and social media clues from security analysts and journalists with infrastructure analysis to promptly identify and dismantle CCP intelligence agencies’ malicious activities.
Furthermore, establishing close contacts with governments, private organizations, especially professional social networks and freelance platforms, can assist in early detection and disruption of these malicious networks.
It is noteworthy that all four websites are equipped with the artificial intelligence building tool “Lovable”. This model indicates that AI can accelerate the establishment of new malicious infrastructure, making early intervention particularly crucial.
The article also urges the United States to continually brief current and former government officials, as well as private and nonprofit professionals who frequently interact with the government (such as think tank analysts), to enhance awareness of this threat and caution against the consequences of collaborating with these CCP spy agencies.