The numbers and personal codes of more than 100,000 Internet banking and auction-site clients are feared to have been stolen by hackers from across the Taiwan Strait.
Criminal Investigation Bureau officials said yesterday that they had arrested a Taiwanese man named Chen Chung-shun (陳崇順), 30, in Hualien, and seized a huge amount of confidential data, including 45 million e-mail addresses, almost 200,000 bank and auction-site account numbers with their corresponding personal secret codes, and information on three figurehead bank accounts.
Investigators believe Chen has been collaborating with Chinese hackers since February to steal Internet bank codes by planting "shell" or "revised" versions of "Trojan horse" programs into the personal computers of customers using Internet banking services.
Although Chen said he had obtained hundreds of thousands of bank account codes, police found only a portion of the code information at Chen's premises in Hualien.
Chen reported told investigators that he had transferred approximately 100,000 accounts and personal codes to the China-based hackers, and he had no backup copies in his database.
Investigators have urged the public to change their bank codes immediately to avoid losing their money.
Chen had reportedly gathered 45 million Taiwanese e-mail addresses, and in mid-February, he started sending advertising e-mails containing shell or revised Trojan horses to those e-mail addresses. By mid-March, he had sent out over 18 million e-mails.
Police said the banks' firewalls a had not been compromised, but that using the "shell" versions provided by Chinese hackers and attached to the e-mails, Chen managed to record account numbers and personal codes as they were input by bank customers.
After obtaining account num-bers and personal codes, Chen proceeded to transfer money to other accounts.
Although the total amount stolen by the ring is estimated to be several million NT dollars, the full extent of the losses is not yet known.
Officials said the ring withdrew the money from the International Commercial Bank of China ATM machines in China, or transferred it to hundreds of figurehead accounts which had been established in the names of 10 Taiwanese people.
Hundreds of thousands of bank-account numbers, with corresponding personal codes, were exposed to the hackers' machines, according to investigators.
The officials said that among the bank accounts tampered with were savings accounts with funds in excess of NT$200 million (US$5.9 million).
Bureau officials described this type of Internet crime as "secretive, shapeless, borderless, anonymous and without restrictions on distance." They said the total damage caused by the hackers was not yet known.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS