Mystery of the Chinese woman who allegedly tried to sneak into Trump's Mar-a-Lago with a USB stick of malware A Chinese woman was caught sneaking into President Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club with a thumb drive of malware, it was claimed yesterday. Yujing Zhang, 32, was collared after possibly trying to slip into a bash at the swanky resort promoted by Li "Cindy" Yang, the former massage parlor boss who denies allegations she sold …
Yes, and a resort manager the pre-empts Secret Service thinking she could have been maybe, perhaps, if he/she remembers well, and if not wrong a relative of a club member. so she should be let in... never take the chance of offending some rich member of the club, even in the name of national security...
I wonder who handles the nuke suitcase when Trump is in Florida...
who is asking directions to the swimming pool armed with four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive device and a thumb drive.
BTW You can definitely swim without a swimsuit.
Backups. Redundancy. Those are IT best practices, no?
Sure, you could say 4 smartphones is overkill redundancy, but if you must have two SIMs (work and personal), then that's perfectly normal.
Portable hard drives tend to break when dropped, a feature carried over from regular hard drives. That thumb drive is a nice backup. But let's keep the expenses down and don't buy two thumb drives.
And the laptop because how else are you supposed to use Word/Writer at the pool within the United Nations Chinese American Association conference? And how do you expect to answer e-mails too? Nobody can real on small smartphone screens... especially at the pool.
You know you've hit the right level of viral ecosystem evolution when you insert the drive and several dozen unrelated nasties try to take over the (inevitably Windows) machine, fighting each other for dominance. The victor then merges bits of the other into itself and grows stronger, ergo a new strain of A/V resistant malware emerges.
Hey, if it works for bacteria and immunocompromised organisms...
I never have that problem. The first thing I do is reformat them so they're no longer in (Ex)FAT format or NTFS, and secondly I rarely use Windows. It's not impossible to infect other platforms, but it's more work. USB infections, for instance, don't get to auto-play.
I'm yet to ever have a USB that has thrown red flags from the AV. That said, I typically only use them between machines I trust, and typically said USB is a memory card in a USB reader that has only ever been in my home PC and my camera.
My work has been pretty good at drumming safety into us - "Don't use a USB picked up in the carpark" etc.
Was given one at a ((internal) work) conference years ago, and it's still sitting in my misc box awaiting formatting if I ever feel the need to use it.
She "may be the daughter of..." letting someone in... social engineering, no she wasn't even pretending, but the guy wasn't even sure of her identity so no talent on either side.
My experience of Chinese IT the presence of malware is common, not necessarily intentional.
This sounds like a chain of amateur screw-ups being blown up out of proportion to divert the inevitable blamestorming...
Yes, it sounds weird. What on earth would any miscreant want with so much kit simply walking up to the entrance.
"Zhang produced two Chinese passports displaying her photo." Why produce TWO passports?
"Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a regular news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday: 'I have no understanding of the situation you mention.' " That seems a reasonable statement even if she is a Chinese agent.
Tin foil hat Conspiracy Theory: It's someone [American?] that hired her and set her up to make the Chinese Government look bad?
"In a court filing on Tuesday, a public defender representing Zhang said she was invoking her right to remain silent." A good plan when you have already demonstrated idiocy. What exactly can she be charged with on the evidence? She was LET in without being searched or anyone qualified to decide explaining who she might me. She didn't use any of the equipment?
> Why produce TWO passports?
It's moderately common among business travellers - one to be sent off for a visa for trip N+1 while away on trip N. Alternatively to stop a country from seeing you've been somewhere they don't like - e.g. it used to be the case with Israel and some Arab nations, although I've heard now that Israel puts the stamp on a piece of paper stapled into your passport, which can therefore easily be removed.
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Now let me get this straight: an unaccompanied asian woman turns up apparently for a bash at the resort organised by Ms Yang, a "former massage parlour owner". She's a bit cagey about what she's there for. The asian woman gets stopped at the gate, then a resort employee turns up and maybe thinks "There's a woman here for one of Ms Yang's bashes, without a good story. Hmm: Ms Yang, former massage parlour owner, unaccompanied asian lady at gate, 2+2=4, I think I know why this lady might be here, better let her in"...
Well, someone's intelligence organisation is having budget problems, because it's 'only' $200,000 + $14,000 per year to buy membership there, which presumably entitles one to use the pool whenever one feels like it.
Perhaps Ms Zhang was taking Groucho Marx's advice "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member".
^This.
Of course the alleged "ambiguous nod" to the resort manager's suggestion that she was the daughter of a member is probably one trigger after she said she wanted to "go to the pool", not necessarily "use the pool" as suggested in this article.
That said, there are a number of other oddities in the story. It seems there was a similarly named event scheduled for that day but it had been canceled so it's entirely plausible that was merely a miscommunication and she could equally have thought that Trump would be attending or speaking at the cancelled event.
More interesting to me is that the passports are said to be from the ROC (Republic of China) a.k.a. Taiwan and not the PRC. Of course that doesn't rule out her being in Shanghai when her friend "Charles" invited her to Palm Beach and it's highly likely the only thing she did wrong was answering questions without a lawyer. Folks have to learn you can't talk your way through these situations because all you're doing is giving them more ammunition.
No need to worry, it will be blown out of any reasonable proportion as pols try to use it for political gain then it will fade away once they figure out it was largely a misunderstanding and/or miscommunications on Ms Zhang's part and they'll lock her up for 5 years anyway.
1. Zhang is the third most common name in China, a land where a few names cover a good part of the population. Imagine letting in someone called "Smith" because they had the same name as a member. I suppose "Brown" would be the closer equivalent in the UK.
2. She was obviously out of place. Can you say "Decoy" ?
3. There was this German-sounding guy with an Asian caddie who wore a funny looking bowler hat.....
My favourite part of the description of what supposedly happened was, ""A preliminary forensic examination of the thumb drive determined it contained malicious malware," the complaint said.'
Presumably, 'malicious malware' is the evil twin of the kinder, gentler 'benevolent malware.'
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