Did the Martians also take over your mobile?

via WikipediaI hoped it would have remained a secret a bit longer, but unfortunately a Time-reporter actually finished an AP-story on the unlucky official US-laptop who was supposedly copied during a business trip to Beijing. At the end of the story, a trip from the Beijing airport proved to be an interesting one:

A senior U.S. intelligence official, Joel F. Brenner, recounted a separate story of an American financial executive who traveled to Beijing on business and said he had detected attempts to remotely implant monitoring software on his handheld "personal digital assistant" device — software that could have infected the executive's corporate network when he returned home. The executive "counted five beacons popped into his PDA between the time he got off his plane in Beijing and the time he got to his hotel room." Brenner, chief of the office of the National Counterintelligence Executive under the CIA, said during a speech in December.

Brenner recommended throwaway cellular phones for any business people traveling to China.

"The more serious danger is that your device will be corrupted with malicious software that takes only a second or two to download — and you will not know it — and that can be transferred to your home server when you collect your e-mail," he said.

I might as well admit it: a similar thing happened to me when I visited Beijing in March. But unlike what you might think, it is not the Chinese who did it, it is the Martians. They are actually very kind and friendly people, who will invite me one of their days to Mars. No visa needed.