The spy's Gmail account

Hi, it’s Drake. A Chinese spy used Gmail and iCloud as he stole corporate trade secrets. But first...Today’s must-reads:• Adobe agreed to bu [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi, it’s Drake. A Chinese spy used Gmail and iCloud as he stole corporate trade secrets. But first... Today’s must-reads: • Adobe [agreed to buy software design startup Figma]( in a $20 billion deal. Its stock tumbled, but [VCs got a windfall]( • Texas Instruments, faring better than its peers, is [planning $15 billion]( in share buybacks • TikTok’s new spontaneous photo feature [looks a lot like BeReal](. For Your (and Google’s, Apple’s and the FBI’s) Eyes Only When a man named Xu Yanjun was tried last fall in Cincinnati, it marked the first time ever that an officer of China’s Ministry of State Security was lured out of his home country and prosecuted. A specialist in stealing aviation technology secrets, Xu’s arrest gave the FBI an unprecedented trove of information about the inner workings of China’s intelligence services. Jordan Robertson and I investigated Xu’s rise and fall for the[cover story in the latest Bloomberg Businessweek](. The tale is full of cloak-and-dagger tradecraft—digital correspondence, documents and recordings show how Xu developed sources, broke into hotel rooms and directed cyberattacks—but we also see how the grim demands of being an espionage bureaucrat gradually unhinged him. All of this is thanks to the MSS officer’s tech habits. At a time when those of us in the US and Europe are debating the security risks of Chinese hardware from Huawei Technologies Co. and Chinese tech platforms like TikTok, it’s striking to see how blithely actual members of the Chinese intelligence establishment rely on Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Xu and his colleagues have iPhones, and they reach out to their sources over Gmail. One indictment connected to the case describes how a Chinese government hacker manages his malware arsenal through Google’s AppEngine development platform. Xu, the MSS officer at the center of our story, even used a Gmail address to register his iCloud account, a decision that simplified the lives of the FBI agents investigating him from afar. Search warrants to Apple and Google in addition to digital forensics tools for copying data off a physical phone itself are what uncorked the flood of information the case was based on, and even spawned multiple new indictments. What are we to make of the trust he and his colleagues place in these tech giants from beyond the great firewall? It goes without saying that his work data were extremely sensitive, and his personal life—evidence of which he regularly backed up to the cloud—was pretty debauched, as well. It would probably not have become a matter of public record if he hadn’t ventured outside China, of course. But still, it’s potentially a testament to the allure and ease of these products, or the incredible rarity of people who actually take data security seriously. Xu also had a work Huawei phone, which might have given the FBI more trouble (on the other hand, the password was his name and birth year), but he didn’t seem to use it much. Maybe living in a world of constant subterfuge and hacking makes one a little nihilistic about the possibility of anything being truly secure. —[Drake Bennett](mailto:dbennett35@bloomberg.net) The big story In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Ethereum completed the Merge—a key revamp of its network, marking the [crypto world’s most-ambitious software upgrade to date]( and paving the way for changes that could fuel more usage of the commercial blockchain. It’s very bad news for [Ether miners](. What else you need to know A Zoom service outage on Thursday morning hit at least [tens of thousands of users](. A little-known insider from a prominent coal-mining family in Indonesia [wields big influence]( at top tech firms in Southeast Asia. Buy-now, pay-later faces tougher rules as [the CFPB chief weighs in](. Figma’s CEO joined Bloomberg TV to talk about his company’s [record-breaking acquisition](. Join Bloomberg Live in London for the [Bloomberg Technology Summit]( on Sept. 28 to see Europe’s business leaders, policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors explain how they’re adapting to this new environment—and discuss solution-based strategies. Follow Us More from Bloomberg Dig gadgets or video games? [Sign up for Power On]( to get Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more in your inbox on Sundays. [Sign up for Game On]( to go deep inside the video game business, delivered on Fridays. Why not try both? Like getting this newsletter? 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