‘Sex Warfare’: China, Russia deploy honeypots to seduce tech execs, obtain industry secrets: report

Citing insiders in Silicon Valley, the Times of London reports that there have been a number of men who have been targeted by foreign women hoping to gain access to industry secrets in tech. James Mulvenon, who is the chief intelligence officer at Pamir Consulting told the outlet, “I’m getting an enormous number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman."

“It really seems to have ramped up recently," he added. He also talked about how two attractive Chinese women showed up to a business conference in Virginia last week, where they had all the information about the conference and attempted to gain entry. “We didn’t let them in,” he added. “But they had all the information [about the event] and everything else. It is a phenomenon. And I will tell you: it is weird.”

Mulvenon has investigated espionage in the United States for 30 years and said that one real vulnerability for US is the "honeytrap" tactic, “because we, by statute and by culture, do not do that. So they have an asymmetric advantage when it comes to sex warfare."

According to five counterintelligence officers who spoke to The Times, China has been hosting start-up competitions in the US in an attempt to steal business ideas and sabotage American companies. In the past four years, China has been involved in over 60 cases of espionage. However, one counterintelligence officer said that "only scratches the surface."

The CCP and Russia have been recruiting ordinary citizens to perform their espionage, rather than trained agents, which makes the cases harder to spot. “We’re not chasing a KGB agent in a smoky guesthouse in Germany anymore,” one senior analyst told the Times. “Our adversaries — particularly the Chinese — are using a whole-of-society approach to exploit all aspects of our technology and Western talent.”

One former counterintelligence officer said that he had investigated a case of a Russian woman working at an aerospace firm and then marrying a colleague. She went to a modelling school in her 20s but also attended a “Russian soft-power school." The woman disappeared for 10 years, then was back in the US as an expert on cryptocurrency.

“But she doesn’t stay in crypto,” the former officer said. “She is trying to get to the heights of the military-space innovation community. The husband’s totally oblivious.”

“Showing up, marrying a target, having kids with a target — and conducting a lifelong collection operation, it’s very uncomfortable to think about but it’s so prevalent,” he added. “If I wanted to be out of the shadows, I’d write a book on it.”