A Chinese national surnamed Tong (童) has been named the prime suspect in Taiwan’s largest data leak and is now a wanted person, while a Taiwanese surnamed Cheng (鄭) was indicted for contravening the Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法), the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday.
The prosecutors’ office launched an investigation after the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau forwarded the case to it.
The office said that Tong — who reportedly used OKE as an online persona — is suspected of listing 23.57 million household registration records obtained via hacks for sale on BreachForums in October last year, seeking a cryptocurrency payment of US$5,000.
Photo: AP
The data were primarily from before April 2018, prosecutors said.
Tong was named the primary suspect, as an electronic wallet in his name was designated as the recipient for the cryptocurrency transaction, prosecutors said.
The wallet had been active and Tong could have transferred funds from it into fiat currency in China, they said.
Cheng on Oct. 31 last year allegedly purchased the hacked data, using the ACE Exchange to transfer 4,999.2 Tether tokens to Tong’s wallet, prosecutors said.
At the time of the trade, one Tether token was worth US$1.0003 when the market opened and US$1.0002 at the close of the day.
Cheng told investigators that he had made the purchase because he wanted to know if personal information could be bought, the office said.
Prosecutors recommended that Cheng’s indictment be deferred for one year, as he had shown remorse, had not used the data for illegal activities and had agreed to delete the information.
He should pay the state NT$500,000 in compensation, they said.
The office instructed the bureau’s Digital Security Division to continue to track the hacker who breached the Ministry of the Interior’s servers.
However, as the incident occurred in 2018, equipment and system data from other agencies that might have been connected to the household registration data servers were no longer stored, the bureau said.
The US Department of Justice, the FBI, the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of the US Inspector-General on June 23 seized the clearnet domain for BreachForums under a warrant issued by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The combined effect of the monsoon, the outer rim of Typhoon Fengshen and a low-pressure system is expected to bring significant rainfall this week to various parts of the nation, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The heaviest rain is expected to occur today and tomorrow, with torrential rain expected in Keelung’s north coast, Yilan and the mountainous regions of Taipei and New Taipei City, the CWA said. Rivers could rise rapidly, and residents should stay away from riverbanks and avoid going to the mountains or engaging in water activities, it said. Scattered showers are expected today in central and
COOPERATION: Taiwan is aligning closely with US strategic objectives on various matters, including China’s rare earths restrictions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Taiwan could deal with China’s tightened export controls on rare earth metals by turning to “urban mining,” a researcher said yesterday. Rare earth metals, which are used in semiconductors and other electronic components, could be recovered from industrial or electronic waste to reduce reliance on imports, National Cheng Kung University Department of Resources Engineering professor Lee Cheng-han (李政翰) said. Despite their name, rare earth elements are not actually rare — their abundance in the Earth’s crust is relatively high, but they are dispersed, making extraction and refining energy-intensive and environmentally damaging, he said, adding that many countries have opted to
FORCED LABOR: A US court listed three Taiwanese and nine firms based in Taiwan in its indictment, with eight of the companies registered at the same address Nine companies registered in Taiwan, as well as three Taiwanese, on Tuesday were named by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) as a result of a US federal court indictment. The indictment unsealed at the federal court in Brooklyn, New York, said that Chen Zhi (陳志), a dual Cambodian-British national, is being indicted for fraud conspiracy, money laundering and overseeing Prince Holding Group’s forced-labor scam camps in Cambodia. At its peak, the company allegedly made US$30 million per day, court documents showed. The US government has seized Chen’s noncustodial wallet, which contains
SUPPLY CHAIN: Taiwan’s advantages in the drone industry include rapid production capacity that is independent of Chinese-made parts, the economic ministry said The Executive Yuan yesterday approved plans to invest NT$44.2 billion (US$1.44 billion) into domestic production of uncrewed aerial vehicles over the next six years, bringing Taiwan’s output value to more than NT$40 billion by 2030 and making the nation Asia’s democratic hub for the drone supply chain. The proposed budget has NT$33.8 billion in new allocations and NT$10.43 billion in existing funds, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said. Under the new development program, the public sector would purchase nearly 100,000 drones, of which 50,898 would be for civil and government use, while 48,750 would be for national defense, it said. The Ministry of
RSS