Canada to remove China’s top messaging app WeChat from government devices The government of Canada has decided that Tencent’s WeChat app, and Kaspersky's security suite, are too risky to run on government-issued mobile devices. The president of Canada’s Treasury Board, Anita Anand, announced the ban on Monday. “The Chief Information Officer of Canada determined that WeChat and Kaspersky suite of …
>>> "What next, removing Grindr from Air Traffic control systems or Pokemone Go from RCN submarines ?"
Possibly. Tencent has more than one spying app for you.
Tencent has been caught spying on your web browsing history with QQ Messenger
"QQ Messenger, a popular Chinese instant messaging app by Tencent, was caught scraping web browser history with their desktop client. The discovery was made by Chinese internet users on the Q and A platforum Zhihu. [...] Basically, all Chromium based web browsers store your internet history in an sqlite file in local storage. QQ Messenger would seek out this file and scrape the information, comparing it to a list of keywords and then phoning home if any matches were found."
How did they get wechat on a government phone in Canada ?
We just went on a business trip to China, Whatsapp/Google is blocked. Wechat needed a local Chinese phone number to install but we couldn't buy a local sim without a Chinese ID
Ended up using an international data-only E-sim + corporate vpn + Teams to talk to each other.
The Tories didn't get the PPE from China. They got it from their mates at a huge mark up, which taxpayers paid.
I wouldn't care if the government reverted to dot matrix printers, land lines and fax. The less we see of them, the better.
Perhaps for added security, we should make them all speak Navajo to each other, for the duration of their term.
And again the problem is not removing a given popular app from government devices. The problem is how the hell did it get installed there in the first place ?
It's a government device. It should only have government-approved applications.
If you can't manage your device security upstream, then you have to manage it when it's too late downstream.
Governments seriously need to consult Fortune 500 companies (and mostly banks) on how to secure their devices. Then we wouldn't be subject to this clown show.
It's not a 'government device'. It's an Android or Apple device. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA had a backdoor in all of them.
Anyway, aren't the British government getting rid of proper security, as it stops them spying on people? Soon there will be no secure apps, in the name of national security.
And which 'everything' app would you trust more? The Chinese one or the Musk one?
I was in 100% agreement with you up to your last line. Sorry, business and banks are not really good at security, either. Usually an attempt is made, then some C-level wants to have full access to company resources on their phone. While on vacation.
A number of years ago, I worked for a Really Big Company in their security department. We used corporate-managed Blackberry devices for business phones. Encrypted, wrong PW too many times, it self-wipes, remote wipe ability, etc. One day, the boss informs us that the new CIO "has five iPhones and iPads" -- and we would be supporting them as "work devices" for everyone. Somehow. The answer was, "iProducts are coming", the question is how do we contain the risks. It was pretty clear, "that's not a good idea" wasn't an acceptable reply (at the time, there were basically none of the controls for iProducts that Blackberry had. And as you can see from Blackberry's current place in the market, it wasn't just this company that didn't care).
I think we need to start asking questions like, Why do executives need 24x7 access to everything no matter where they are? Doesn't this mean they have made themselves a critical failure point in the company? Shouldn't there be people available to make decisions when someone is away from work?
The president of Canada’s Treasury Board, Anita Anand and Anita Anand, BBC presenter often get mistaken for each other...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-66070489
On the topic of mistaken identities, the above page also has a side link to the Guy Kewney/Guy Goma interview...
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