Suspect arrested in hack attack on local news site
Central News Agency
2015-12-10 05:20 PM
A Taiwanese man suspected of hacking into the United Daily News (UND) website to remove a report has been arrested, police said Thursday.
A denial-of-service (DDoS) attack program, developed and distributed in China, was found on the computer of the 24-year-old man surnamed Hu, according to police.
The news website udn.com came under a DDoS attack that paralyzed its server Tuesday, the same day the company received an anonymous phone call that demanded removal from its site of a news story about a hacker who had been indicted for threatening a juvenile, police said.
The suspect had posted a similar demand on the newspaper's Facebook page, offering in return to help fix what he said were problems on the news site.
Suspecting that the hack attack Tuesday may have come from Hu after the UND ignored his request, police launched an investigation into the matter and searched his home in Keelung, where they found the Facebook message and the DDoS program on his computer.
Based on those findings, Hu was arrested, and after police showed him the computer records, he confessed to launching the hack attack on the UND site to remove the news story.
He said he had also asked the Apple Daily to do the same but he did not hack its website.
Hu was also found to have hacked into an online game arena in October and brought down the real-time strategy video game League of Legends. That attack affected 140,000 online players and caused the online video game company financial losses of NT$4.18 million, according to police.
Hu's case has been referred to the Keelung District Prosecutors Office for investigation into alleged hacking of computers and threating the UND.
(By Liu Jian-bang and Evelyn Kao)
