British firms working for the UK’s military or intelligence services are advising staff not to connect their mobile phones to Chinese-made electric cars over fears that Beijing could steal sensitive national security data.
Executives at two of the nation’s leading defence giants have told The i Paper that the entire sector is taking a “cautious” and “belt and braces” approach to the possibility of the Chinese state spying on staff via the country’s electric vehicles (EVs).
The security clampdown within the UK’s highly secretive defence sector follows revelations from The i Paper that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has banned cars relying on Chinese technology from sensitive military sites across the country. In some cases, the MoD has asked staff to park their EVs at least two miles from their workplace.
[…]
The latest disclosure of security worries relating to Chinese EVs could also raise concern among some EV buyers, who are increasingly turning to brands like BYD because of their affordability and longer range.
The role of Chinese companies and equipment in critical infrastructure was brought sharply into focus after the government was recently forced to take control of British Steel from its Chinese owner, Jingye Group, to prevent it from closing blast furnaces at the country’s last virgin steelmaking site.
It is understood that the UK’s leading military production groups, including BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, and Raytheon, as well as US defence giant Lockheed Martin and French defence and cyber security firm Thales, are among those firms that have taken precautions against the potential for Chinese EVs to spy on their staff.
[…]
Your phone should be configured to only allow charging and no data transfer by default. This is not a hardware issue and can be solved by just training employees properly.
Depends how paranoid you want to be, what if there’s an exploit that allows the bypass of the USB connection mode?
Yeah thats a valid concern
Thanks. It never occurred to me to do that. I rarely connect my phone to anything other than a wall socket anyway, but just in case…
Took me a few minutes to find the setting. It turned out I needed to have developer mode enabled to change it on Android, so it’s probably not something that a lot of people are aware of.
Thats fucked wtf?? Im on CalyxOS so idk whats normal but do normal android roms not have this exposed to the user without manual intervention? What company is your phone from if i might ask?
On my Pixel if I plug into a usb data connection it defaults to charge and gives me a notification that lets me switch USB mode. Think this flow has been standard for a while, also seen it on Samsung devices.
Might be there’s some other option under developer options.