A young man, surnamed Chung (鍾), has been identified as the alleged hacker behind a series of attacks on the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau, the Presidential Office, Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) and the central bank, the bureau said yesterday.
Investigators believe Chung has launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and uploaded the videos of those attacks to YouTube, the bureau’s Taipei office said.
Chung’s motive is apparently to advertise his hacker-for-hire Web site, TDDoS.pw, which he set up with Poland-based hackers in February and has since attracted more than 2,000 members, the bureau said.
The Web site bills itself as the most powerful DDoS attack service provider in the nation, and performs cyberattacks and stress testing for users who pay with bitcoin, the bureau said.
On Monday, investigators questioned Chung at his residence and seized an unspecified number of devices, the bureau said.
Data extracted from his computer showed that Chung has carried out more than 20,000 attacks on networks worldwide, including government offices, online gambling firms and financial holding companies, the bureau said.
Since many of the attacks were staged as proof of ability, they tended to occur late at night and the duration was less than a minute, it said.
As a result, many institutions allegedly targeted by Chung were unaware that their network services had been disrupted, it added.
Five people are being investigated on suspicion that they hired Chung to carry out cyberattacks, it said.
The bureau urged government agencies and private companies to improve their protection against DDoS attacks.
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