The hacking of Radio Taiwan International’s (RTI) Web site last month was an “internal breach,” representing a new level of cognitive warfare from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it seeks to undermine public trust in the media, an expert said yesterday.
RTI on Sept. 11 reported to authorities an online attack in which the banner on its Web site was replaced with the People’s Republic of China flag.
Mirror Media yesterday reported that the purported for-hire hacker, a Web administrator at RTI surnamed Wu (吳), allegedly accessed sensitive information online, including household registration systems.
Photo: Tsai Wen-chu, Taipei Times
Wu denied any criminal conduct and said that the Web site’s backend system had major security loopholes, which he had alerted the company to, but to no avail.
The case is being investigated by the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office, which has named as suspects Wu and a section supervisor, surnamed Yue (岳), as well as an RTI contractor surnamed Huang (黃).
The Taipei District Court on Friday released Yue on NT$100,000 bail, prohibiting him from leaving the country and ordering him to wear an electronic monitoring device.
It also released Wu and Huang on NT$270,000 and NT$150,000 bail respectively.
CCP cyberattacks usually come from outside an organization, but the RTI hack originated from inside the company, said Hung Pu-chao (洪浦釗), deputy director of the Center for Mainland China and Regional Development Research at Tunghai University.
The incident shows that the aim was not just to obtain information and shut down the Web site, but to undermine the credibility of Taiwanese media, Hung said.
Taiwan has heavily focused on guarding against the spread of disinformation and manipulation using artificial intelligence, but has overlooked that news media are on the front line of cognitive warfare, he added.
Legislation, including the National Security Act (國家安全法) and the Cyber Security Management Act (資通安全管理法), fails to address incidents of internal collusion or outsourcing vulnerabilities, resulting in systemic blind spots, he said.
The government should integrate legislation, cybersecurity and internal controls to build a cross-ministerial mechanism that can prevent media infiltration, Hung said.
Real defense does not mean covering up incidents, but exposing them and educating society on cyberattacks so that public trust becomes “the strongest firewall of democracy,” he said.
The Mirror Media report said that Wu was allegedly working on behalf of Taiwan People’s Party Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌).
Wu provided the news outlet with screenshots of chat conversations with Huang Kuo-chang and his office assistant, which showed that he had previously been contracted to assist in investigating corruption.
However, Mirror Media reported that Huang Kuo-chang had used unpaid hackers to access data from a chat on the messaging service Telegram in which former Democratic Progressive Party secretary-general Lin Hsi-yao (林錫耀), then-minister of justice Tsai Ching-hsiang (蔡清祥) and then-National Security Council adviser Chen Chun-lin (陳俊麟) discussed high-level judicial appointments.
Huang Kuo-chang allegedly compiled, processed and disseminated the data, with the hackers uploading screenshots to the “dark Web” priced at NT$20,000 each, the report said.
The High Prosecutors’ Office has launched a separate criminal investigation into the matter, it added.
Huang Kuo-chang called the report “absolutely absurd,” saying that Wu had simply reported cybersecurity vulnerabilities to him.
He said he asked Wu to provide further information, although Wu did not provide complete data.
Additional reporting by Lin Che-yuan
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