China detains four for hacking fraud

Beijing: China has detained four people and punished eight others for fabricating a massive leak of online personal data by hackers over the past month, the country’s Internet watchdog said. China’s leading anti-virus software provider, Beijing-based Qihoo 360, claimed in late December that the personal information of more than 6 million users of the China Software Developer Network (CSDN), the country’s largest programmers’ website, had been leaked by hackers, raising concerns about web security and triggering widespread panic. The company said the leak included user IDs, passwords and e-mail addresses in clear text. The hacking case later escalated after the personal details of subscribers to more websites, including popular online shopping, gaming, social networking and even financial institution sites, were said to have been leaked. However, a police investigation into the cases has found that most of those websites had not been attacked by hackers at all over the past month, or that they had been attacked without their subscribers’ information being leaked, a spokesman with the National Internet Information Office said yesterday. [caption id=“attachment_178898” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“China has detained four people and punished eight others for fabricating a massive leak of online personal data by hackers over the past month, the country’s Internet watchdog said. AFP”]  [/caption] “It can be seen from the recent cases of personal data leaks that they fabricated such information for different purposes, such as for showing off, defrauding others of money, promoting their web security products or disturbing and disparaging the real-name registration move,” the spokesman with the National Internet Information Office said. Police has cracked 12 such cases, nine of which involved insiders working for the companies stealing and illegally selling online personal data, and the other three involved in fabricated information leak, he said. Four people have been detained and eight others received formal admonishments in punishment according to the country’s public security regulations, he said. In the CSDN case, a 19-year-old jobless man surnamed Xu was found to have faked a large-scale leak of personal data just to “show-off,” and he had received “admonishment” from the police, Chinese official news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying. As for the leak of some users’ passwords on a few well-known social networking websites, such as Sina Weibo and www.kaixin001.com, police found that hackers decoded the passwords through guesswork and the personal data banks of the websites had not actually been attacked, he said. Police have identified the hackers and are hunting them, he said. China has the world’s largest online population, with the number of Internet users reaching 485 million by the end of June last year, according to the China Internet Networks Information Centre (CNNIC). In the first half of 2011, 217 million Chinese Internet users, or 44.7 per cent of the country’s total online population, were attacked by malware, including viruses or Trojan horses, and 121 million had the experience of having their accounts or passwords stolen, CNNIC data shows. PTI