If China is going to get serious about hacking, prosecutors have their work cut out for them. This is meant for an international audience, not for domestic criminal prosecution,” said James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., based in Washington. “It seems aimed at bolstering the Foreign Ministry’s claim that China is getting tough on hackers. “In China, as elsewhere in the world, the trend is to get stricter with these kinds of crimes.”īut critics say the arrests might be little more than a propaganda ploy in the midst of the Google scandal. “In legal terms, these hacking crimes are completely new and only recently have prosecutors understood how dangerous they are,” said Li Xuxi, a Beijing lawyer, who applauded the arrest of Black Hawk’s founders. To some, the announcement now suggests that the Chinese government could be getting more serious about cracking down. Police actually shut down the network in November, two months before Google made international headlines when it said it might leave China after it was hit by a series of cyber attacks originating there. Black Hawk is accused of collecting more than $1 million in tuition from 12,000 subscribers and 170,000 others who took its online courses, according to Chinese media. Police in Hubei province announced to the Chinese media over the weekend that they had closed down the operation, which state media said was the largest training site for Chinese hackers, and arrested three of its ringleaders. “Spare one minute to learn and you’ll make your life more exciting.” “Guaranteed successful attack tools!” is how Black Hawk Safety Net advertised its online academy for hackers. The pitch was tantalizing: Just a little training and you too could hack websites, earning thrills, power and, in many cases, money.

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