Canada’s spy agency warned Canadian universities in August to be wary of using Chinese technology, including a service offered by e-commerce company Alibaba to help students based in China take online Zoom classes in this country.
Alibaba, which has come under close scrutiny from China’s ruling Communist Party after its billionaire founder, Jack Ma, ran afoul of President Xi Jinping, provides an accelerated virtual private network server so students in China can attend Zoom classes without lag. Alibaba’s “Alibaba Global Accelerator” service is marketed as a solution to avoid network congestion and reduce delays in communication.
OTTAWA — New documents show Canada’s cyberspy agency was so alarmed by the potential fallout from an alleged secrecy breach by a senior RCMP employee that it revised a damage assessment to “severe” from “high” in the days after his arrest.
Espionage is an old story. Long ago Moses dispatched twelve spies to explore the land of Canaan as a future home for the Israelite people. They reported they had found a land flowing with milk and honey. On December 8, 2020 it was disclosed that individuals, almost certainly Russian, had hacked the U.S. security firm Fire Eye, only one of the many targets compromised in the cybersecurity industry. It soon became apparent that foreign hackers had attacked both governmental and unofficial organizations. A large-scale espionage campaign has breached the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments and other government agencies. Microsoft and customers were compromised, and emails had been stolen from U.S. private sector companies. The victim of a highly sophisticated targeted attack, Orion Platform, the server of the network management system Solar Winds, which produces software for the U.S. government and private companies, was 
