2010 02 08

Black Hawk Down: China Busted Hacker-Training Site

The Chinese government has arrested three hackers who were running an online hacker-training business. The trio of hackers operated Black Hawk Safety Net, a company that collected nearly $1 million from more than 120,000 members. The three unidentified individuals were arrested after using the now-defunct 3800CC.com web site to train and provide the necessary tools to wannabe hackers, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Government authorities seized $249,000 in cash, nine servers, five computers and a car from the company. Last year, China made it a crime to provide other people with hacking tools. More than 195 million Internet users were attacked by viruses and Trojan horses online within the last six months of 2009, and the accounts and passwords of 110 million users were stolen, according an annual report by the China Internet Network Information Center. Increasing users' trust in the Internet has become "a problem pressing for solution at present," the report determined. Two men, identified as Li Qiang and Zhang Lei, were listed as the founders of Black Hawk Safety Net in a separate case from 2007. The founders were arrested at that time after their involvement in a virus that caused problems on both private and government computers in the city of Macheng, Xinhua reported. Delayed Reaction News of the arrest, however, comes nearly three months after the three were arrested by police in the Hubei province. The delayed announcement comes just weeks after China's government has denied having any knowledge of a major attack on Google's China-based service. Google, however, came under attack by what many believe was a Chinese hacker. Some believe the attack was done to sabotage Google's service in China in an effort to increase the number of users and advertisers who frequent Baidu, Google's China-based competitor. "The digital spying in this case and several other...