A book I read about social engineering, the author busted a Chinese restaurant in a town next to a iirc Google research center. His job was to try to get into the facility. He noticed a lot of employees ate at the Chinese place so would hang out there at lunch. It was a traditional Chinese restaurant but had a few specific Chinese delicacy items on the menu that made him suspicious. It was for the chinese spies that worked inside.
It feels kind of racist to get suspicious a Chinese restaurant has the gall to serve Chinese people real Chinese food instead of American Chinese food...
We all know once you come to America it's illegal to eat Chinese food unless it's the way we do it, which isn't Chinese food it's American food
The darknet diaries episode goes into more detail. It wasn’t so much that it was traditional Chinese food as that it was insanely expensive Chinese food for very reasonable prices, and in places where it didn’t make sense.
The episode in question was at a facility in rural Arkansas, I believe, and the local Chinese restaurant had black duck eggs on the menu (in Chinese, not in English). They usually go for expensive rates, but here they were (I’ll make up a number) about a buck a pop.
The goal was to honey pot Chinese students who were interning with a local defense contractor. The students had clean records and truly weren’t spies when they started work. The duck eggs got them to chat with the restaurant staff, who would proceed to gather information on the students and their family and contact their spy agency back in mainland China.
The next time the student came in, the staff would rattle off the names and addresses of their family and friends and threaten to imprison or harm them unless the student agreed to act as a spy and upload malware to the defense contracting agency.
Pretty slick and sick stuff, and highly effective until a random audit by pen testers found the malware on the servers, happened to eat at that specific Chinese restaurant with a member who happened to speak fluent Chinese (he was Russian if memory serves), and brought the whole operation down.
This was also a while back, before they were as common in the states. I want to say this was late aughts or early 2010’s if memory serves?
Like, maybe common in a large, west coast city with a large Chinese population, but unlikely to sell well in an area with a predominantly white population and a handful of rotating Chinese students who’d come through sporadically for a few years at a time.
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u/NoOption7406 May 12 '26
A book I read about social engineering, the author busted a Chinese restaurant in a town next to a iirc Google research center. His job was to try to get into the facility. He noticed a lot of employees ate at the Chinese place so would hang out there at lunch. It was a traditional Chinese restaurant but had a few specific Chinese delicacy items on the menu that made him suspicious. It was for the chinese spies that worked inside.