Facsimile of phishing e-mail

What’s Chinese for Anonymous?

Bùzh míng de.

So far, no one calling themselves Bùzh míng de have taken credit for phishing 45 million bank customers to phoney bank websites in order to hack their credit card and account information.

Forty-five million. Anonymous must be so embarrassed today.

The phishing scheme involved the usual e-mail that appears to come from a bank, which is responded to at a site that looks like the legitimate bank site, and when people log on, they hand their information over without suspecting for one minute that the next real e-mail they get from their bank will tell them their card is maxed out.

The government is arranging for their 10 largest search engines to list legitimate banks as the first result of web searches. This will work if the e-mails don’t include a link to the “bank” the way many real bank sites do. The engines will also put a symbol next to legitimate bank sites to show that they are legitimate.

It’s not just the banks that have been hit. Tianya, a very popular chat site, had 40 million user names and passwords hacked. CDSN, the largest forum for programmers, had six million users’ information stolen, e-mail addresses, log-in names and passwords. Everything had been stored in “plain text” form. There have also been activist attacks. The company website of Menginu, the company involved in the tainted milk scandal, had its homepage hacked and replaced with the message “Do you have a conscience?”

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is investigating the attacks, and issued the statement, “The department believe the recent leak of user information is a serious infringement of the rights of internet users and threatens internet safety.” It’s all pretty funny given the extent of internet spying the government does. They monitor sites to detect anything that resembles anti-government activity. China has the highest level of internet use in the world, which is logical since they have the largest population of any nation, 1,339,725,000 people, almost 16% of the world’s population.

Phishers, scammers, spammers and hacker succeed because so many of us learn to use our computers on our own and just sort of fumble around pretending we know what we’re doing. We have always assumed that the cyber theives could only operate in a free society, not one in which every single e-mail and chat conversation is picked up by the government for analysis. That such large scale theft occurred under the noses of the analysts is an embarrassment for the government, and the Chinese do not like to be embarrassed.

Related articles

• China combats hi-tech crimewave (bbc.co.uk)
• China to tighten Internet Security to prevent phishing attacks (buzzom.com)
• Chinese government protects ITS citizens against hackers (dailymail.co.uk)
• Now that’s a bit rich: Chinese government protects ITS citizens against hackers – after series of high-profile Chinese attacks on West (dailymail.co.uk)
• Charting the Evolution of Phishing (blogs.rsa.com)