A hacker, surnamed Pan (潘) has been indicted and detained following an investigation by the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office for hacking into the city's fire department’s emergency dispatch system and selling real-time incident information to four funeral service providers.
Using stolen data, the four businesses could quickly arrive at places where people had suffered serious injuries to secure clients from the recently deceased, prosecutors said.
The hacking operation went on for four years, they said.
Photo: Reuters
Prosecutors have detained Pan on suspicion of offenses against computer security (妨害電腦使用罪) under the Criminal Code (刑法) and the investigation is to be expanded.
The Kaohsiung City Field Division of the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau launched the investigation after it received a tip-off in August regarding cybersecurity attacks in the dispatch system of the Kaohsiung City Fire Department.
After extensive data analysis, the division found that 30-year-old Pan had hacked into the system and requested Kaohsiung Prosecutor Li Yu-tzu (李侑姿) to lead the investigation.
On March 28, a search warrant was issued for Pan’s residence, where hacking programs and equipment were seized by prosecutors.
Investigators found that between June and August last year, the 119 dispatch system of the Kaohsiung Fire Department experienced abnormal connections from multiple sources, disrupting operations.
Former Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) driver Pan had been commissioned in 2021 by funeral service providers to study the Ministry of the Interior’s (MOI) dispatch system, after which he began hacking into the system in 2022, the investigation found.
Pan set up a demo server that was able to access call times, dispatch teams, incident information, locations, GPS coordinates and other sensitive information, then later expanded the operation to receive real-time incident data from 21 cities and counties across Taiwan, it found.
In response, the MOI and Kaohsiung Fire Department began to minimize publicly available data and implement strict controls, though they were ultimately unable to prevent leaks, it found.
Pan set up his own cloud-based platform and used his mobile phone to create a data server that provided real-time information to funeral service providers, it found.
His monthly earnings reached several thousand to tens of thousands of New Taiwan Dollars, the investigation found.
Funeral service providers tracked the fire department’s teams on a 24-hour basis, waiting for cases to appear involving serious injuries or cardiac arrest at the scene, it found.
Their staff were then sent to the scene ahead of competitors, enabling them to secure an additional five to 10 clients per month, it found, with some even handing out business cards before ambulances could arrive.
The hacking incident resulted in more than 30 million unauthorized connections per year, posing a serious threat to public sector data security and public interest, investigators said.
Prosecutors brought Pan in for questioning, during which he confessed to the hacking operation.
It was also found that four funeral service providers had participated in the scheme, whose staff and IT engineers were suspected of involvement.
Further searches were conducted on June 13 and 24, with additional suspects summoned for questioning and employees of the funeral service providers and IT engineers indicted for crimes concerning computer security, who were later released on bail ranging from NT$30,000 to NT$500,000.
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