Google notches victory in Chinese hacker fight
How much pressure does it take to get Chinese officials to crack down on would-be cyber-criminals? Plenty, but there’s been modest movement recently with the shuttering of an alleged hacker training operation.
Police in central China have shut down the organization that openly recruited thousands of members online. The folks who ran the “Black Hawk Safety Net” provided its “students” with cyber-attack lessons and malicious software, Chinese state media said recently.
Officials say the training group schooled paying customers in Web site hacking techniques and Trojan software.
The shutdown comes as concern continues to mount that China is a center for industrial espionage and criminal behavior on the Web.
The situation got so bad recently, search giant Google threatened to abandon the country, ostensibly because of Chinese censorship. But the threatened pullout came after the software giant charged that Google e-mail accounts were hacked from China.
Google wasn’t the lone victim in that assault, which also hit at least 20 other companies. But it was by far the biggest player with the most muscle.
Seems that flexing that muscle had at least a small impact.
Nobody seems to know if the lawlessness surrounding China’s Web activities is the result of independent criminals or if there’s any state or military involvement in the schemes.
But for now, the hacker training operation — and its 12,000 paying subscribers, as well as its 170,000 free members — will have to find another home. Seems that officials seized five computers and a car, shut down all Web sites involved in the case and froze 1.7 million yuan ($250,000) in assets along with arresting three people.
