Traveling to China or Russia? Better go lean and light--leave your cellphone and laptop at home and instead bring “loaner” devices, which you erase before you leave and wipe clean the minute you return. Disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never let your phone out of sight and, in meetings, not only turn off the phone but also remove the battery (the microphone could be turned on remotely). Connect to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copy and paste passwords from a USB thumb drive (never type in a password directly).
Electronic Security a Worry in an Age of Digital Espionage - NYTimes.com:
. . . What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee. Digital espionage in these countries, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets. “If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese and Russians are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated,” said Joel F. Brenner, formerly the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.". . . . "The implication, said Jacob Olcott, a cybersecurity expert at Good Harbor Consulting, was that devices brought into China were hacked. “Everybody knows that if you are doing business in China, in the 21st century, you don’t bring anything with you. That’s ‘Business 101’ — at least it should be.” Neither the Chinese nor Russian embassies in Washington responded to several requests for comment. . . . " (emphasis added)
