Internet 2.0

A major international media investigation has revealed that a technology firm linked to the Chinese Communist Party has created and mined a global database of 2.4 million individuals – many of them political leaders, scientists, journalists and others in positions of influence – based on their online presence in order to monitor them and their networks.

China Has Built a Massive Global Database for Hybrid Warfare, International Media Reports The revelations that Chinese tech firm Zhenhua has built a database of 2.4 million individuals for intelligence operations are significant though unsurprising.

For Australia that means more than 35,000 individuals among a global database of 2.4 million people and 650,000 organisations.

Zhenhua boasts of collecting 3 billion articles from 40,000 sources.

The scale of this collection, which is done through scraping the servers of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Crunchbase, potentially allows an intelligence agency or government department to quickly pull up key data on an individual or industry and identify their connections to others in the field.

How China's database targeted Australia's space industry Leading figures in Australia's nascent space industry suspect their extensive profiling in a Chinese database can be linked to repeated cyber attacks, as Beijing seeks a technological advantage in the strategic sector.