Chinese Authorities Arrest 460 Hackers

Hundreds of computer hackers have reportedly been arrested in China this year, as part of a large-scale crackdown on cyber crime.

The Ministry of Public Security reported on Tuesday that, since January 2010, Chinese authorities have arrested 460 hackers, resolved 180 cases of computer crimes, and closed 14 websites providing hacking software or training.

“Currently the situation regarding cyberattacks in China is still extremely grim, and hacking attacks domestically are still widespread,” the ministry said in a statement.

State media in China is warning that military commanders should be seriously considering how to tackle the challenge to information and Internet security, and deal with the issue of cyberwarfare.

Some industry commentators are reading China’s crackdown on hacking as an admission that the country if facing a similar problem to Europe and the US – namely that large numbers of IT-literate people are crossing over into dark hat hacker territory.

“China is rapidly entering the ascendant in the IT stakes, with the country now boasting the largest number of mobile phones of any country in the world. It’s also clear that the country’s Internet infrastructure is growing rapidly, along with the number of Internet users,” said Claire Sellick, event director for Infosecurity Europe.

She added that the rise of the Internet means the world has become a global village, making it just as easy for hackers in a Chinese city to attack a company IT resource in the UK as it is for a hacker elsewhere in the UK.

“China’s Ministry of Public Security has described the hacker situation in the country as very grim and, whilst it observes that a number of computers in companies have little or no effective security measures, it really does illustrate the scale of the problem,” she said.

The news comes amid ongoing controversy following the release of secret US diplomatic files by whistleblower site Wikileaks, alleging that the Chinese government had ordered the hack against Google back in January, and backed many other acts of cyber-warfare.

The hack in January, which prompted Google to leave China temporarily, used “government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government,” according to a source in China. It was reportedly “orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticising him personally”.

Wikileaks has since been hit with a denial-of-service attack and removed from the Internet’s domain name service (DNS), but now has an address in Switzerland, Wikileaks.ch, apparently provided by the local Pirate Party.