96 alleged chinese hackers arrested
News on 12 Mar 2017
News on 12 Mar 2017
The Chinese police have reported the arrests of 96 hackers in a massive police action across 14 provinces, with spokesmen revealing that the suspects are highly educated technicians who gained access to vast amounts of private information that included account passwords and ID numbers.
The police operation was mounted to combat data and private information theft in which hackers had accessed the web servers of social media, online gaming and video-streaming sites, later selling the information through online forums and instant messaging groups.
Police spokesmen said that the stolen information was subsequently used by criminals to create forged credit card accounts and to participate in online gambling.
The South China Morning Post newspaper, reporting on the raids, claimed that one of the main suspects, surnamed Zheng, was an engineer at Beijing-based JD.com, one of the largest e-commerce companies on the mainland. He is alleged to have stolen data from his employer’s servers before resigning to take up other IT posts at large companies, where he perpetrated further thefts.
“Another main suspect, surnamed Weng, had been hired as a technical adviser at a gaming website and online gambling platform,” the newspaper reported.
China claims the world’s largest internet population, with 731 million users as at 2016. The figure is expected to reach 760 million by the end of this 2017, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology said.
During a video and telephone conference Friday, Chen Zhimin, the Chinese deputy minister of public security, acknowledged that cyber-attacks and internet invasions of privacy remained “prominent” in the country, though police were vigorously pursuing the criminals responsible.
He revealed that in 2016 the police had arrested 4,261 individuals suspected of stealing information. 391 of these had been employees of entities that had ready access to personal information, including banks, universities, telecoms, e-commerce firms and brokerages, he said.
