The police has detained four people and punished eight others for fabricating rumors about a massive leak of online personal data, the country's Internet watchdog said Tuesday.
According to the National Internet Information Office, in late December, Beijing-based Qihoo 360, China's leading anti-virus software provider, claimed that the personal information of more than 6 million users of the China Software Developer Network (CSDN), the country's largest programmers' website, had been leaked by hackers.
The hacking case later escalated after the personal details of subscribers to more websites, including popular online shopping, gaming, social networking and even financial institution sites, were said to have been leaked.
However, a police investigation found that over the past month, most of the websites had not been attacked, and for those attacked, there was no leak of subscribers' information.
In the CSDN case, a 19-year-old jobless man surnamed Xu was found to have faked the story just to "show-off." As for the leak of some users' passwords on a few well-known social networking websites, such as Sina Weibo and www.kaixin001.com, police found that hackers decoded the passwords through guesswork. The personal data banks of these websites had not actually been attacked.
The identities of the hackers were confirmed and the police are hunting them, said a spokesman of the National Internet Information Office.
China has the world's largest online population, with the number of Internet users reaching 485 million by the end of June last year. In the first half of 2011, 217 million Chinese Internet users, or 44.7 percent of the country's total online population, were attacked by malware, including viruses or Trojan horses, and 121 million had the experience of having their accounts or passwords stolen.
Last month, authorities in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen launched an Internet supervision measure requiring local microblog operators to implement real-name registration requirements for users, a move designed to curb online rumors and enhance social credibility.
The National Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information and the Ministry of Public Security have vowed to severely punish those who attack websites and leak personal information or fabricate and spread rumors in this regard. They have also vowed to take effective measures to protect the security of online personal information.
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