China pulls plug on net hacker college that signed up 180,000

POLICE in central China have shut down a hacker training operation that openly recruited thousands of members online and provided them with cyber attack lessons and malicious software.

The crackdown comes amid growing concern that China is a centre for internet crime and industrial espionage.

Search giant Google said last month its e-mail accounts were hacked from China in an assault that also hit at least 20 other companies.

Police in Hubei province arrested three people suspected of running the hacker site known as the Black Hawk Safety Net that disseminated hacking techniques and Trojan software, the China Daily newspaper said yesterday. Trojans, which can allow outside access to a computer when implanted, are used by hackers to control computers illegally.

Black Hawk Safety Net recruited more than 12,000 paying subscribers and collected seven million yuan (640,000) in membership fees, while another 170,000 people had signed up for free membership, the paper said.

The report said police seized nine servers, five computers and a car, and shut down all websites involved in the case. Authorities also froze 1.7 million yuan in assets.

The shutdown of the site followed an investigation involving 50 police officers in three other provinces.

The case can be traced to a hacking attack in 2007 on an internet caf in Macheng city in Hubei that caused web services for dozens to be disrupted for more than 60 hours, the paper said. A few of the suspects caught in April said they were members of the Black Hawk Safety Net.

The website 3800hk.com could not be accessed, but a notice purportedly from Black Hawk circulating on online forums said that a backup site had been set up.

Google threatened last month to pull out of China unless the government relented on censorship after it said it had uncovered a computer attack that tried to plunder the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

Government officials have defended China's online censorship and denied involvement in internet attacks, saying the country is the biggest victim of web attacks. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said hackers tampered with more than 42,000 websites last year.

Scrutiny of Chinese internet security is growing following a rash of attacks traced to China and aimed at a wide array of United States and European targets, including military contractors, banks and technology companies.

Security consultants say it is hard to know what proportion of hacking from China is the work of individuals and whether the government is involved. But some say the high skill level of some attacks suggests China's military or other agencies might have trained or directed the hackers.

"The scale, operation and logistics of conducting these attacks – against the government, commercial and private sectors – indicates that they are state-sponsored," security firm Mandiant Corp said in a report last month.

"The Chinese government may authorise this activity, but there's no way to determine the extent of its involvement."