Chinese authorities have shut down a training site for hackers and arrested three of its organizers.

Cynics could see the throttling of Black Hawk Safety Net, in the central China province of Hubei, as cover for state-sponsored hacking. The clampdown occurred back in November, but news about has only now been made public.

The Register covers the story at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/08/china_cybercrook_training_outfit_raid/

And the BBC does so at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8503637.stm

Now, as is well known, Google recently declared it was no longer comfortable with censoring search results on its Chinese site on the grounds that the emails of human rights activists had been compromised (amazingly!) from within the territory of the PRC.

Bruce Schneier has an essay here that points out that Google had originally  created the backdoor access system to gmail accounts that Chinese hackers have exploited in order to comply with US government requirements.  

It is hard to form a view on all of this. Is the Chinese Communist Party genuinely cracking down on lawless hackers, or is it sponsoring them? Should the infosec community in the UK and US take an Olympian view that, in the long run, China is a country like any other than happens to have the world’s biggest internet population, and is on the march (and good luck to it)? Or is it the most dangerous ever foe in the making?

Delicious

Digg

Reddit

Facebook

StumbleUpon