China has requested all of their foreign tech collaborators who have businesses on its territory to alter their products before releasing them on the Chinese market.

The Chinese government has imposed new, stricter legislation for the foreign companies which will make them less secure. The official authorities requested that IT infrastructure providers, such as Cisco, should provide access to their hardware in the form of back-doors leading to their products. Softwares will have to follow the same rules, so ATMs which use Microsoft software will also have all their secrets exposed – going as far as revealing its source code. In the same manner, Juniper software, used by a lot of Chinese banks functionaries when logging from outside the bank, will have to give up their encryption, so the Chinese officials can approve it.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft and other giants of the tech world are concerned about giving up their most secret blueprints, fearing the high possibility of being cyber-attacked. It would be equal to drawing them a map inside their product manufacturing.

The new laws would apply only in the Chinese market, but it forces all the businesses to go to a lot of unnecessary trouble in serving the market. Therefore, it is no surprise that a coalition of 18 major American businesses was formed, with the approval of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Consumer Electronics Association, all greatly involved in U.S-China trade. They launched an official protest against the oppression of the Chinese communist party over the cybersecurity.

The American companies think that the new legislation is in agreement with the strong nationalist trend that is taking over China, and they are excelling in making it very difficult for foreign companies to succeed in China.

The new official requests also present a major threat, in addition to the theft of intellectual property which takes place in China, where government hackers try to give their national corporations an illegal head start. It’s also quite clever, because they are now trying to force American companies to voluntarily give up their source codes, instead of having their spies steal them.

Another new rule enforced on foreign companies is stopping them from using proven encryption technology – which is a way of protecting and securing all communication. Instead of using that, the Chinese authority provides its own encryption algorithms. If you’re a cybersecurity expert, you know this is not fair and will submit your products to unsupervised surveillance. Basically, the Chinese government requests that all foreign privacy be exposed, making the American companies unable of promising cybersecurity.

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