Following weeks of investigation, police announced yesterday that they have cracked a pager jamming scheme.
Police allege that a local paging company is guilty of sending millions of bogus messages to clients of two competing pager companies in an effort to disrupt their services.
The company in question, Taiwan Paging Network Corporation (TPNC,
The disruptions took place between Aug. 6 and Aug. 23. Police say that the purpose of the scheme was to jam the competitors' clients with unwanted and meaningless messages. TPNC, say police, wanted to cripple its competitors' business by causing customers annoyed at the constant stream of messages to lose confidence in their service providers.
"Based on our investigation into the identity of the transmitting server, the dialing accounts used and the communication records of the TPNC, we feel that it is safe to say that they are the prime suspects in the case, " said a police officer at the computer crime squad under the National Police Administration, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"This is the first time that we have seen this sort of invasion in a telecommunications system," the officer added.
Police said they believe the company randomly sent disrupive mail to both voice mail and internet mail users using the numbers of its two competitors.
"Our credibility among customers has been affected by the invasions, as we have fielded complaints from so many customers over the repeated messages," said Andy Lee (
"Some customers were quite upset as many of the messages were sent during the middle of the night," he said.
"Not only have hundreds of our customers complained, many of them have dropped our services completely, partly because of this," Lee added.
Despite the fact that company computer programmers had written new security programs to defend themselves from such interference, Lee said, the attacks kept coming as the hackers continued to break into its system and had developed even more advanced programs to get through, Lee said.
"As our paging system cannot be shut down to our customers, we have found it difficult to keep hackers away. But what we have been able to do is to increase our monitoring of the system," said Green Chen (陳忠佑), a manager at Chung Hua International Paging, one of the companies affected.
TPNC officials did not respond to questions by the Taipei Times regarding the allegations.
Company president Wu Chien-hua (
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