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Students are magnet targets for espionage. Warrens the m I five. Ken
McCollum said that hostile actors such as Russia, Iran, China were attempting to
steal research secrets from Britain's universities with dispariting regularity. He cautioned that the systemic
competition to get ahead in science and technologies every bit as far reaching as the
race to space. If your field of research is relevant, then be careful
because you're going to be of interest to people are employed by these states China,
Russia and Iran. M I five's investigations are spotting such tactics taking place
in subtle ways, such as they attractive conference invitation which we've known for years,
or collaboration proposal or strategic partnerships or donations with strings, or jointly funded
research, or even through post grad students themselves. Mister McCollum, Warren students
and lecturers precisely because their great universities are great and rightly prize openness, there
are magnetic targets for espionage and manipulation. He stressed the security as a requirement
for research integrity. Students and academics should therefore be alive to these issues and
up for the conversation and make the effort with their support to make those difficult
choices consciously. A lot of times they'll lure them in. They look for
these individuals where they're grad students, professors, and again, as we mentioned
earlier, they'll lose them in with ideas such as joint funded research, going
into donations, investment proposals, anything that they can get access to. We
saw the Russians did this. I think I were a decade ago. They
had two people that were already PhDs in Russia, but they came over to
grad schools here. Can remember of the universities in the US, and they
didn't acknowledge that they had graduate degrees in the particular field, and they went
in as master's students and went all the way up. They stayed here as
ten years, even had a family here, and so huge amount of data
is siphoned from them. So universities and grad students their targets as well. Now