MFSocket: A Chinese surveillance tool

Elliot Alderson
7 min readJun 25, 2019

It is well known that China spies on its fellow citizens. In this article I will tell you the story of an Android application called MFSocket, a new monitoring tool made in China. This tool allows the police to extract from the victim’s phone a lot of data such as calendar events, SMS, MMS, videos, contacts, Telegram contacts, …

The Story

On June 21, 2019 Muyi Xiao, a Chinese journalist, posted on Twitter a thread on an Android application called MFSocket. On Chinese social networks people started to report about police checking people’s phones in Beijing and Shanghai and she decided to investigate.

Twitter thread by Muyi Xiao about MFSocket

Indeed by searching ‘MFSocket’ on Google I find this type of report:
- “When the police check the phone, it will be installed for you: Mfsocket”
- “Yesterday, the company asked us to go to the police station, and then the police installed a software called MFsocket. I thought it was monitoring software!”

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Elliot Alderson

🇫🇷 Hacker. Fight disinformation at Predicta Lab. Not completely schizophrenic. Not related to USANetwork.