When domestic IT companies and startups are looking for employees for specialized programming positions, they often hire a foreigner who then works remotely. This is common in the IT environment. However, Czech companies have recently encountered a remarkable phenomenon: job applicants who, according to the documents they provided to their prospective employer, should be sitting at a computer somewhere in Europe are actually Chinese.
According to experts, this is not just a ploy to get a lucrative job in Europe with a salary of several thousand euros a month, but may be a way to gain access to sensitive data and business information. In other words, it may be an attempt at industrial espionage.
This was the case of one of the Czech technology startups that MF DNES met (due to the sensitivity of the case, the editors did not mention the name of the company). A person interested in the job of a developer applied for the job via the social network LinkedIn. According to the documents he provided to the company, he was a Danish citizen living in Estonia. He successfully passed several rounds of the recruitment procedure, which tested his programming skills. However, the information in his passport was suspicious to the company. So it decided to thoroughly vet the programmer.
"When we followed the trail of the linkedin profile, we found that it was interlinked with others. They all have common characteristics, they try to give the impression that these people are graduates of European universities and usually work remotely for a long time, for example from Serbia or Estonia," says Petr Moroz from Scaut, which screened job candidates for the company.
The club of hundreds of linkedin profiles then converges on the Chinese city of Dandong, a city of two million near the border between China and North Korea. The city is home to, among other things, a Chinese army base.
That the Chinese intelligence services may be behind the activities of the 'fake A.I.' is just one theory. However, the largest domestic secret service, the BIS counterintelligence agency, has long warned against Chinese activities on Czech territory.
"We have long warned about their efforts to engage in various variations of so-called industrial espionage. This concerns mainly technology companies, but also scientific projects, where there is an attempt to exploit various financial offers, invitations to China for cooperation, congresses and symposia. We are therefore working very intensively with scientific and academic institutions to be prepared for these efforts," said BIS spokesman Ladislav Šticha.
State vs. TikTok
Just days after Koudelka's speech, the National Cyber Security Bureau (NCSB) issued a warning about the popular Chinese app TikTok. Because of the fact that it collects a large amount of data about its users that is unrelated to the short videos that have made the app a global phenomenon. This includes data from the user's calendar or contacts.
"I have come to issue the warning based on a comprehensive analysis of information about the TikTok app that we have obtained from both public sources and our allies," said Lukáš Kintr, director of the National Cyber Security Authority.
Some state institutions, ministries and authorities had banned TikTok for their employees even before the NCIB warning. Universities, for example, responded to its warning by urging students not to use the app if they are connected to the university network. According to a survey by NMS Market Research, one in ten Czechs stopped using TikTok after the cybersecurity bureau's warning.
