Biggest Chinese hacker training site taken down

Black Hawk Safety Net, the biggest Chinese hacker training site, has been shut down by the police. The tally is: three people arrested; nine Web servers, five computers and one car confiscated; $249,000 in assets frozen.

According to China Daily, the website was ran from the Hubei province in Central China, and offered attacking programs and malicious software to its subscribers. In its 5 year run, the website accumulated some 182,000 members, of which 12,000 were VIP subscribers that provided a little over $1 million in membership fees.

A couple of interviewed members said that they could download trojans and were instructed on how to steal accounts. They were even sometimes taught how to write malicious code, and the courses were charged from 100 to 2,000 yuan ($15-$293). One of them – a registered member of a couple of training sites – said that since November a lot of these and similar sites were unavailable.

This kind of activity was only recently made illegal by law, and China is obviously no slouch in implementing it. No wonder, since the official figures regarding losses caused by hackers mounted to $85 million in 2009.