It's not like an additional 11% ownership and voting rights would prompt the board to pass a motion to begin using Fortnite to spy for China.

The benefit of partial ownership (or dual ownership) is that it opens up the network of internal employees and management to recruitment while also providing plausible cover as it is a branded and well-known "western" firm

They only need to get another 11% to vote with them.(assuming they have 40% voting representation).

That's one or two other shareholders you need to bribe / convince. Not difficult, especially when the company you just invested in is learning what it's like to have scrooge McDuck money and want more.

> They only need to get another 11% to vote with them.(assuming they have 40% voting representation).

This depends a lot on who owns the other 60%. If it's one other party, the 40% effectively has no control. If it's a public company with a million other owners and they're the largest individual shareholder, many of the others won't even show up to vote their shares and their 40% of all shares will generally be >50% of the ones that show up to vote for anything.

It's a private firm, and the voting example I gave isn't really that good.

A more reasonable case is that they can heavily influence what contractors and 3rd parties are used for projects. Not something that needs a board vote, but something a 40% shareholder has a lot of say in.

I imagine they don't hold a vote on whether to put backdoors or not on a board meeting. So that raises the question. If not like that, then how does it actually happen?

You just go to the executives and point out that you own 40% of the ownership, and you'd really like them to hire these couple of guys and put them on this team, and then not ask too many questions about what they're doing, or you'll use your 40% ownership to make their lives more difficult, which at 40% can easily involve ousting them personally. (See other people's comments about the difficulty of getting enough voters to actually vote to prevent a 40% stake from being the vote winner.)

The literal thing I just said isn't even that unethical; suppose you own 100% of a company, then telling it to hire someone specific and pay them this much and put them here would be fully within your rights as owner. (There's probably a legal hurdle or two to clear, but AFAIK it's nothing that will actually stop you.) How that changes ethically as your ownership stake decreases I'll leave as an exercise for the reader. What's unethical is what they'll be doing when they get there, and who else is tainted ethically depends on how much they know and what they do about it.

The other examples are public companies. Epic Games isn’t. Something shady could still happen but there are only a few shareholders that control the vast majority of the company. I think a few other firms and the founder.

A bit too legion of Doom in retrospect.

But you would get to heavily influence what contractors and vendors the company works with are good vectors.

As well as partnership and integrations.

They don't need to do anything with shareholders to spy on anybody.

Heck, if China wants to spy on anybody, they don't even need to resort to technology to begin with... Unlike the PRC, USA is a more or less open society — want someone's secret? Just send your man there; Want to influence someone? Just ask......

I totally don't understand American concern with technology being used by espionage, while it lets this go.

You're thinking too small.

Yes, stealing individual secrets is best done with old school tradecraft. Spies in suits, photos of scandals with dominatrixes.

But what if you want build a system which can identify homosexuals based on textual conversations? You buy Grindr.

Or what if you want to get a backdoor for future exploitation on almost every computer in the US? You buy Fortnite. Because one of those computers will belong to the child of someone important. It only takes one slip by them to get Stuxnet from their home PC to their work PC.

You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling.

You don't need to buy a company to use its systems in an attack. The odds of discovery and disclosure ahead of time increase massively if you go through a major company's decision making processs as part of your hacking process. Companies are people. Lots of them. They are consequently not good at keeping secrets, particularly "I'm hacking the world for evil" secrets.

Ah yes, brave and valiant humans who took 12 years to blow the whistle on PRISM.

I shouldn't have mentioned attack vectors, the first case is the better opportunity these days. Data data data.

> Yes, stealing individual secrets is best done with old school tradecraft. Spies in suits, photos of scandals with dominatrixes.

Why would anybody need to do more than steal individual secrets they've been told to recon?

Because you can't build a homosexual scoring model for the social credit system by learning that one person is secretly gay.

You can build that model if you have access to the data of 20 million people.

Even easier / party not connected to the above hacks the anti-cheat software. No need to buy the company. Probably already has happened.

But also easy to revoke. If you own the code, you don't have to let anyone know what you're sneaking in.

If for example they also owned battlEye they would have a seat at the table to 'suggest' that was used for anti cheating.

No comment on the wider claims, but 40% does give them a tremendous amount of at least soft power.

Sure, but then the problem would be their ownership of the anti-cheat company, not of Epic. FWIW, BattlEye appears to be German and Easy Anti-Cheat Finnish (and bought by Epic).

That's not how covert operations works. More likely is just a series of subtle moves to get "trusted" assets into the right places, followed by coordination outside of corporate channels to implement the backdoor. You'd have trusted agents actually implementing and using the backdoor, and less trusted assets (ideally, to allay suspicion, people not of your nationality that you've leveraged via MICE or some other mechanism) to look the other way and generally act like useful idiots.

Not to mention that some games are translated for the Chinese/asian market. Guess who will suggest a company for that? Then one could slowly make it so that the translation team needs more and more access rights to the deployment platform (or just stealing credentials is an option too - especially from the inside). All you need is to be able to insert a little script and be able to press the "deploy now" button. Hidden backdoors are so '90... Online games are perfect cybernukes.

They also own Riot Games, Grinding Gear Games and Supercell.