“Hello, sir?”……”Many people have had experiences like this where they receive targeted sales calls on their phones out of the blue. Besides accidentally leaking personal information, it is likely that the merchants you frequently visit have been hacked! Recently, the Cyber Police Department of Hangzhou Public Security Bureau successfully dismantled a hacker gang that destroyed computer information systems and stole customer data01 Case Review
The Cyber Security Department of Linping District, Hangzhou, discovered that a key internet company’s server in the area was attacked by hackers, and customer information was stolen, resulting in direct economic losses exceeding 500,000 yuan.
Hangzhou Linping Cyber Security immediately conducted forensic analysis and identified a criminal group led by Gu Mouzhao, which was found to have written their own Python scripts to scrape customer data from the victim’s company, and used the customer data to promote and generate leads for prostitution rings through phone calls and text messages.
02 Detailed Process
It is understood that Gu Mouzhao and Gu Mou are both post-00s, and were sentenced to 10 months for aiding and abetting crimes, released in 2022.
One day, Gu Mouzhao felt that the business was slow, and heard that someone was illegally obtaining website member data to generate leads for offline stores, thinking this was a quick way to make money.
After discussion, the two hit it off. In early February of this year, they posted recruitment information online, seeking a web scraping expert.
At this point, another key figure appeared—Shi Mou, born in ’93, who worked in a small company as a live-streaming operator, but was looking for part-time work due to low wages. He had self-learned Python online and contacted Gu Mouzhao with a try-it-out mentality after seeing the recruitment information.
Gu Mouzhao provided Shi Mou with some company URLs, and Shi Mou successfully crashed two websites, obtaining some member information.
The two formed two call teams, using this member information to promote and generate leads for the prostitution rings, hoping to carve out a “new territory.” However, just as they thought they were getting closer to their dreams of wealth, they were already under the watch of our cyber police.
The Hangzhou Cyber Security Department organized a focused operation, capturing three criminal suspects including Shi Mou (all of whom have been criminally detained), and seizing three mobile phones and two computers on site. The case is currently under further investigation.
Hacker attacks can easily lead to the leakage of personal information of citizens, which can then be exploited by some malicious criminals for targeted scams and other illegal activities.
Individual users should avoid logging into unknown websites while using the internet and computer systems, back up important data in a timely manner, regularly perform security scans on their computers, and patch vulnerabilities; correctly use firewalls to block hacker attack channels; regularly download system patches and upgrade, effectively preventing hacker intrusions.
Enterprise users should implement access control, intrusion detection technologies, and security scans when building websites and deploying other internet projects, use software systems with good security, and update them in a timely manner. Those with conditions can hire professionals for network security management.