The Chinese government on Monday said it had busted an online training site for computer hackers, with three arrests made. The bust, first reported by China's state-run Xinhua news agency, is the latest move by China to counter suggestions that it isn't doing enough to root out cybersecurity villains in its own midst.
The Xinhua agency reported that the hacker bust, which happened in late November in the city of Hubei, China, netted three arrests. According to Xinhua, the hackers operated a business called Black Hawk Safety Net through a web site, www.3800cc.com, that has since been taken down.
Xinhua further reported that Black Hawk Safety Net had brought in about $1 million in income through a network of more than 12,000 subscribers that logged on to access malware tools and training for sophisticated hacks. Two out of the three persons arrested were identified by the Hubei prosecutor's office as 28-year-old Zhang Lei and 29-year-old Li Qiang, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Neither Xinhua nor other news reports of the bust reported why the announcement of the arrests was delayed several months.
The issue of how much the Chinese government does to prevent hackers has been much in the spotlight following allegations by Google, in January, that China was the source of widespread hacking attempts at both Google and a number of other international companies. At the time, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged China to investigate cybercriminals and called for "investigation and its results to be transparent."
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