Top cybersecurity boffin, wife vanish as FBI raids homes

A tenured computer security professor at Indiana University and his university-employed wife have not been seen publicly since federal agents raided their homes late last week.

On Friday, the FBI with help from the cops searched two properties in Bloomington and Carmel, Indiana, belonging to Xiaofeng Wang, a professor at the Indiana Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering - who's been with the American university for more than 20 years - and Nianli Ma, a lead library systems analyst and programmer also at the university.

The university has removed the professor's profile from its website, while the Indiana Daily Student reports Wang was axed the same day the Feds swooped. It's said the college learned the professor had taken a job at a university in Singapore, leading to the boffin's termination by his US employer. Ma's university profile has also vanished.

"I can confirm the FBI Indianapolis office conducted court authorized activity at homes in Carmel and Bloomington, Indiana last Friday," the FBI told The Register. "We have no further comment at this time."

"The Bloomington Police Department was requested to simply assist with scene security while the FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at the residence," the police added to The Register, also declining to comment further.

Reading between the lines, Prof Wang and his spouse may not necessarily be in custody, and that the Feds may have raided their homes while the couple were away and possibly already abroad. According to the student news outlet, the professor hasn't been seen for roughly the past two weeks.

Prof Wang earned his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and joined Indiana Uni that same year. Since then, he's become a well respected member of the IT security community, publishing extensively on Apple security, e-commerce fraud, and adversarial machine learning.

Over the course of his academic career – starting in the 1990s with computer science degrees from universities in Nanjing and Shanghai, China – Prof Wang has led research projects with funding exceeding $20 million. He was named a fellow of the IEEE in 2018, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022, and the Association for Computing Machinery in 2023. He reportedly pocketed more than $380,000 in salaries in 2024, while his wife was paid $85,000.

According to neighbors in Carmel, agents arrived around 0830 on March 28, announcing: "FBI, come out!" Agents were seen removing boxes of evidence and photographing the scene.

"Indiana University was recently made aware of a federal investigation of an Indiana University faculty member," the institution told us.

"At the direction of the FBI, Indiana University will not make any public comments regarding this investigation. In accordance with Indiana University practices, Indiana University will also not make any public comments regarding the status of this individual."

While US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, has recently made headlines for detaining academic visa holders, among others, there's no indication the agency was involved in the Indiana raids. That suggests the investigation likely goes beyond immigration matters.

Context

It wouldn't be the first time foreign academics have come under federal scrutiny. During Trump's first term, the Department of Justice launched the so-called "China Initiative," aimed at uncovering economic espionage and IP theft by researchers linked to China.

The effort was widely seen as a failure, with over 50 percent of investigations dropped, some professors wrongly accused, and a few were ultimately found guilty of nothing more than hoarding pirated porn.

The initiative was also widely criticized as counterproductive, prompting an exodus of Chinese researchers from the US and pushing some American-based scientists to relocate to the Chinese mainland. History has seen this movie before: During the 1950s Red Scare, America booted prominent rocket scientist Qian Xuesen over suspected communist ties. He went on to become the architect of China's missile and space programs — a move that helped Beijing get its intercontinental ballistic missiles, aka ICBMs.

Wang and Ma are still incommunicado, and presumed innocent. Fellow academics in the security industry have pointed out this kind of action is highly unusual. Matt Blaze, Tor Project board member and the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, pointed out that to disappear from the university's records, archived here, is "especially concerning."

"It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there," Blaze said on Mastodon.

"While there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it." ®