A US cybersecurity company says Chinese spyware is placed in dozens of Uyghur-language apps to monitor the movements and conversations of this Muslim minority, in China and abroad. The Uyghurs, mainly Sunni Muslims and speaking a Turkic language, are the main ethnic group in Xinjiang (north-west China), a region long hit by bloody attacks attributed to Islamists and Uyghur separatists. In the name of anti-terrorism, the Chinese authorities launched a vast campaign of repression in the mid-2010s. The United States speaks of “genocide”. The UN raises the possibility of crimes against humanity.
Detecting signs of religious extremism or separatism?
A study published Thursday by the cybersecurity company Lookout, based in San Francisco, assures that since 2018, multiple Android applications in the Uyghur language have been infected with spyware. This “spyware” is linked to Chinese state-backed hacking groups, claims the report, fully refuted by the Chinese Embassy in the United States. The applications concerned offer, for example, road maps, dictionaries or content related to Islam.
They were not available on the Google Play application store, which is blocked in China, but on other stores accessible from Chinese territory. According to the study, this spyware allowed hackers to collect user’s location, contacts, call history, text messages and could even take pictures and record calls. Lookout researchers claim that this “spyware” could have been used to detect signs of religious extremism or separatism.
China has established a vast surveillance network in Xinjiang in recent years.
“This campaign appears primarily to target Uighurs in China. But we found evidence of broader targeting of Muslims and Uighurs outside of Xinjiang,” the report said. “Several of the samples we analyzed posed as mapping apps for other countries with large Muslim populations, such as Turkey or Afghanistan.” Turkey hosts a large Uyghur diaspora.
“We refute (what is) pure speculation and malicious slander,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the United States, Liu Pengyu, told Bloomberg. China has established a vast surveillance network in Xinjiang in recent years, with countless facial recognition cameras, the confiscation of passports and a very large presence of security forces. Uyghurs living outside China also say they have received intimidation calls from Xinjiang police.