14 DAY TRIAL // A man from the eastern province of Jiangsu has been found guilty of hacking into the Red Cross website that was collecting funds for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake. A court of law issued a sentence of 24 months of incarceration time and a fine of 5,000 Yuan (which is roughly about $731 or ?370).
The hacker's name is Yang Litao, a 23-year-old who used to work for a network technology company in Shenzhen, in the South of China. The Kunshan Municipal Red Cross Foundation had set up a web page asking people to donate any amount of money they could, to enable the Red Cross to offer the much needed help to those affected by the recent Sichuan earthquake. The Red Cross posted a bank account number on the web page, but it seems that Yang Litao managed to hack it and modify it. Thus, all the donated money would have ended up in another bank account, one that Yang Litao had opened under a false name.
Yang Litao also loaded a virus onto the site, causing it to go down for about 27 hours. All this took place while the Red Cross was busy with the relief operations.
The Chinese police were quick to catch on to the hacker; they found out that he had managed to successfully hack into several other web pages and immediately took him into custody. Yang Litao's dreams of making big bucks through his scam were all foiled when he was arrested in Shenzhen, at the rented home he was residing at the time.
The Sichuan Province earthquake took place on May 12, this year, leaving about 5 million people homeless. The 8.0 on the Richter scale earthquake also killed approximately 88,000 people. A few days after it occurred, the donation web page was already up and running and the hack occurred on May 18, just six days after the earthquake. Upon its discovery, the web page was shut down.