Thank you for sharing what you have heard about Baidu and that techrepublic link, n.nvt.
I have heard about Anvisoft being founded by a Chinese hacker, (
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/29/anvisoft_chinese_intrigue/) and the Chinese hackers are believed to be working for the Communist Chinese government.
I really like my Kingsoft and IObit software. I hope there are no similar doubts about it.
Well not all Asian software is bad, in fact some products are really good and that's great so no argue there.
But for example Baidu is one of China's biggest software companies similar to Google and Baidu is enjoying its time in a royal way.
Having Asia as your backyard will ensure you of a HUGE increasing market share that even mighty Google sooner or later cannot top anymore for the plain and simple reason in Asia there are to much people.
Then having a tech hungry culture with a modern communistic regime (democratic on the outside vs authoritarian on the inside) add a political power struggle with the west and noone to stop them within their own market almost guarantees software like Baidu to expand faster then a tsunami. And yes to the average user Baidu might be just fine but to a western company Baidu is a serious reason to monitor and expand security across online western networks, pages and sources.
And from a professional POV it is proven that 80% of Chinese software giants have been directly and indirectly linked to information gathering practices with the specific aim to steal as much as they can, and provide a platform where hackers and other GOV sponsored people can do their thing.
Now do not get me wrong, the NSA crap is bad enough, but if China is going to step up their activities then both EU and US will be over run by cyber attacks.
My point here is 5 years ago 4 out of 10 cyber attacks where directly linked to China/Asia and 2 out of 10 where directly successful or caused downtime / damage.
Today 8 out of 10 attacks are from Asian origin (China, NK, Vietnam and some others) and 6/7 out of 10 are directly successful and western security takes notice of the attacks weeks after the initial event.
That says something about the sophistication of the network within China to facilitate the criminal activities and their upgrading capacity in such short time and notable the skill and technological abilities used to side line western hardware and software security.
And that with only a fraction of the budget compared to Western companies and governments/military who spend combined over 800 Billion Euro a year on cyber security related hardware and software. Thats nearly a Trillion US dollar think about it.
The UK alone is spending 800 Million pounds on direct cyber security alone that's just the other layer, thats not counting the data centers and other infrastructure and layers..
While China's cyber budget is less then 10 billion dollar overall.
Thats one hell of a return ...
http://www.website-design.it/cyber-security-taskforce-launch/
So this points directly to the fact that for example US military & industry and EU/NATO critical networks are being penetrated every day, and that the information gathered even with the highest standards of security does not mean #####.
To a dedicated foe.
Even the US and EU combined do not have the capacity at this point to conduct such large wide scale attacks and be as successful as their Asian counterparts WHILE on paper US/EU has everything China could dream of.
And yes Baidu and similar giants are taking a HUGE role in this strategic information gathering on both sides.
Sure Flame, Stuxnet where both very successful but those where targeted attacks based upon a whole western continent working as one to collect all the data needed to engineer a billion dollar hack.
And to do this all kinds of legal things need to be taken care off, making the infrastructure ineffective compared to a Chinese government who openly pays and hires the brightest hackers on the world and give them a legal frame to work from by default and target ANY western network 24/7 while using only a fraction of the capabilities western companies use while yet being 10 times more effective.
For 50 years western media and governmental institutions have been boasting western superiority and capabilities, while true on paper it does not mean ##### on the internet.
And imo as a professional if EU, US does not start realizing that the internet is not limited to who has the most capability and neither does it stop with who is the strongest, economic, military and technology wise and more importantly a battle cannot be fought over the internet as every ping will echo at least twice. It will only be a matter of time till cheap Asian technology washes away the western daydream. And imo it does already do that economic and partly military wise.
So yes i am skeptical at best as i am being confronted every day with the scenario described above.
If somebody comes along and says "Such and such AV detects this program as malware", that doesn't prove anything to me. It is an incentive for research, not a final word. What do Virus Total, Jotti, Virscan, and Metascan say?
