Fergie's Tech Blog

China Busts Hacking Ring That Managed to Penetrate 10 Gov't Databases

Dancho Danchev writes on the ZDNet "Zero Day" Blog:

If you needed a university certificate in China during the last couple of months, there’s a big chance that a group of ten people could have supplied with you such, going a step further and adding your details in more than ten government databases across different provinces in the country, making $300k in the process.

Shanghai Daily is reporting on this sophisticated group of local hackers who were selling “valid” educational certificates by modifying government databases. How they got caught? Apparently, by cross-checking the validity of the certificate, and since they couldn’t hack each and every database in order to add a reference to it, their business model was quickly detected and shut down.

posted by Fergie @ 8/19/2008 04:57:00 PM