Data theft case prosecuted in eastern Zhejiang Province

Source:Global Times Published: 2019/8/6 20:10:58



A group of seven people were referred for prosecution in a data theft case by the procuratorate in Shaoxing, East China's Zhejiang Province, media reports said Tuesday. 

Analysts said the case shows that internet companies should develop high technology to defend against possible attacks on data.

The group was found to have violated personal data after users became aware of unusual log-ins of their accounts on the internet and social media networks. The gang was caught by police in August 2018. 

"China has made great efforts to protect personal data privacy and security," Liu Xingliang, director of the Beijing-based Data Center of China Internet, told the Global Times on Tuesday. "There is not yet a specific law for data protection but other laws and regulations have gradually covered the sector."

"On the overseas servers where defendants stored the stolen data, there were as many as 3 billion pieces of stolen internet user information," a prosecutor who handled the case told the Legal Daily on Monday. 

"Data is an asset of an internet company, especially in the context of big data. Data makes a profit itself, but it should be in a legal way," said Liu.

The Shaoxing procuratorate said that the seven defendants established and worked for an internet company starting in 2014. 

The company signed marketing and advertising service contracts with telecommunication operators in more than 10 Chinese provinces and cities, and these were the places where defendants obtained the remote log-in rights of the operators' servers.

A special program was put on the internal server of the operators to hijack the data traffic, collect and transfer users' data records and access records from cookies, according to the report. There were 96 Internet companies involved as victims including Baidu, Tencent and Toutiao. 

It is normal for a company to put a program on a website to monitor the service quality, but this should be limited to a certain range of data access, Liu added. "The hijack of data flows started from the operators in this case, and it could be seen that the data was lost from the origin, making it hard for the internet companies to defend." 

After being leaked and resold, user data can be used by the defendants to manipulate user accounts, from which the company made more than 30 million yuan in a year/each year??. For example, the company got paid for illegally making promotions through user accounts on social media networks like WeChat, TikTok and Sina Weibo.

"It is necessary to improve the security level of the whole internet industry to better safeguard user data," said was quoted as saying in the report (who said or was quoted?). 

"Data leakers have no bottom line of morality and they risk violating the law to make illegal profits so that the security of personal data is hard to guarantee," said a police officer in charge of internet security in Shaoxing, the Legal Daily reported. "Since 2018, the security bureau has vigorously carried out network security checks."







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