The picture seen above is an advertisement for a Chinese hacker training course.  Now I know many of you are struggling to process this information;  something seems wrong with the picture.  The reason your brain is having trouble with the image,  is that it is located in a place called, the “outdoors”.  Like me, many of you spend way too much time online and this poster is horribly out of place.

The following report from China Daily talks about the growing public concern over hacking and online hacking courses.  It also interviews Wang Xianbing, a consultant for hackbase.com:

“Lots of hacker schools only teach students how to hack into unprotected computers and steal personal information,” said Wang Xianbing, a security consultant for hackerbase.com. “They then make a profit by selling users’ information.”

For investing hundreds of yuan in hacker school, students could obtain the skills to make a fortune, Wang said.

“Hacker school is a bit like driving school – they teach you how to drive but it’s up to you if you are going to drive safely or kill someone,” said Wang.

What the article doesn’t tell you is that Wang Xianbing is also known as Janker and the Lonely Swordsman; one of China’s first generation of hackers and the leader of online conflicts with the US and Japan.

孤独剑客

(Lonely Swordsman)

Thanks to the propensity of every organization to have their own wiki, I have finally been able to nail down the two founders of the “Ultra Right-Wing Chinese Hackers Opposed to Japan Alliance”. Yep, a mouthful. The group was established in the year 2000 and played a significant role in both the Sino-Japanese (2000) and Sino-US (2001) cyber conflicts. Here is a little on the group from my book provided by Chu Tianbi:

The year 2000 would bring both highs and lows for the Red Hacker Alliance. From late January to mid-February, a group calling themselves the “Ultra Right-Wing Chinese Hackers Opposed to Japan Alliance” claimed to have attacked some 30 Japanese web sites “belonging to the ministries, the prime minister, parliament, and the state planning agency.” This was in retaliation for what the hackers perceived as a denial of the Nanjing Massacre following the loss of a Japanese court case by Azuma Shiro. Azuma Shiro was a Japanese soldier who maintained a diary during WWII that recounted Japanese atrocities in Nanjing. The diary was published and his former superior immediately sued Shiro for libel. Shiro lost the case and subsequent appeals in 1998 and 2000. Their web site, located at Http://www.bsptt.gx.cn/public/badboy/hack/, posted an open letter to the Japanese government that stated:

“Let it be known that the objective of this alliance is to carry out savage attacks on the small number of Japanese mad-dogs on the net. The alliance is comprised completely of fervent patriotic Chinese net-worms.”

The site provided over 300 Japanese government URLs, the e-mail addresses of over 100 Japanese representatives, and dozens of the most effective hacker attack tools. Furthermore, the site explained how to use these tools to attack Japanese web sites. In an online interview with Computer Journal, a hacker calling himself “ROOT,” admitted that the paralysis of the web sites for the prime minister’s office, the Bureau of Statistics, and the Bureau of Science and Technology were his doing. ROOT complained that the attacks on Japanese web sites occurred because of dissatisfaction with the Japanese government’s far right denial of the historical facts of the Nanjing Massacre:

“I did absolutely everything by myself. The payback for little Japan didn’t require anyone else. I think I’ve done what anyone should have done as a Chinese person, and anyone else would have done this. I hope they connect what I’ve done with what happened in Osaka, giving a warning to the Japanese devils.”

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