The Dark Visitor

There once was a website named heikeba.com (黑客吧), but alas no more.  The site was run by three Hangzhou University students named Lin Yupeng (林宇鹏), Lin Cailong(林才龙) and Yao Pingqiang (姚平强).  These young entrepreneurs dealt in massive numbers of Trojans.  Reports have stated that they had an extensive collection of malware and at the time of the website’s demise, there were over 500 for sale.  Heikeba.com had over 25,000 registered users and 100 VIP members.  Toward the end, the site was averaging around US $2,700 a month and in less than nine months since its start in January of 2007, had made close to US $14,000.

So, what happened to heikeba.com?  It seems that on 13 September 2007, the group was actually arrested and taken away by police for selling illegal programs.  According to Liu Yuechuan (刘悦川), the police officer who conducted the investigation, he used VIP membership to get into the site and was shocked that it contained so many Trojans.  He was also amazed at the number of viruses hidden on the site.  The website was considered one of the largest distributors of malware in the country.

What makes this so unusual is that it hardly ever happens and certainly not
with this much publicity.   There is hardly a Chinese hacker website that doesn’t sale or distribute some sort of malicious program and you don’t need VIP membership to discover it.  What these guys really did or who they angered is still a mystery.  Maybe it was just time to set an example.

Here is the CCTV special on the investigation and the arrest. It has a lot more details and I will do my best to give you an updated gist of the program.

Think the SAT and GRE were a bear? Don’t even complain around a Chinese student taking the National College Entrance Exam, it is a make or break your life test.

 Tales are legion of parents taking leave for days before the exam and camping in hotels near exam venues, adding to the stress students are already under.

They don’t hesitate to cough up 10,000 yuan ($1,300) for tonics which are supposed to boost brain power and the immune system.

Some families even hire ‘nurses’ to look after test-taking progeny. Xiao Ling, a sophomore at Hainan Normal University and also an experienced home tutor and a good cook, became a ‘nurse’ last month in Haikou of South China’s Hainan Province.

The family paid her 2,000 yuan ($260) a month, roughly four times they would pay a domestic helper, asking her to help their 17-year-old son review his studies, chat with him to ease his pressure and to make nutritious meals.

Chinese hackers don’t see this as a time for high anxiety, just another way to make bank.

 And in another case, a gang of 11 people traveled around country promising students in 17 provinces places at universities, according to the public security bureau of Haikou, capital of the south island province of Hainan.

Three of the 11 suspects were still at large. The suspects forged the stamps and matriculation certificates of many universities, hired hackers to falsify computer enrollment records and pretended to be recruitment staff, police said.

It isn’t just the colleges that are having trouble with hackers, China’s military academies have also had to tighten controls.

It would also impose more serious punishment on academies and officials who violated the rules. These included, for instance, officials who leaked exam papers and hackers who attacked the enrolment in the computer network.

Well, this is kind of fun. Yesterday, we had a chance to look at the underground economy of the Chinese web and today we get to see a small portion of the above ground economy.

Also, for those of you who truly understand Adsense, could you please give me a little analysis on these numbers? Even with the difference in what people are probably charged in China for Adwords, the payouts seem really small compared to the clicks they are getting.

Went to 3800hk.com, site of the Patriotic Hacker, and came across a training course on how to increase your Adsense bucks. 3800hk.com is one of the largest and most popular of the Chinese hacker websites. From what I can tell, they also are some of the best marketers in the business. Their ad on their site reads like most of the testimonials you would see on any US commercial for making a million dollars in real estate.

WARNING: The link below is for a Chinese hacker website!

“Notice for the beginning of a training course on how to make money on the internet”

“After studying how to make money on the internet, most of our members have already earned a barrel of money. The cropped images below reveal the amount of income that members from this site have earned after taking the course.”

There are more of these on the website but I figured this should be enough to give you a flavor of what they are earning.