Suspended Death Sentence for Chinese Official Bribed by AV Company

A senior Chinese police official who received bribes in order to favor a local antivirus company called Rising was handed down a death sentence suspended for two years.

Yu Bing, the former head of the Internet Supervisory Department of the Beijing City Public Security Bureau, was found guilty of graft, corruption and exercising favoritism.

Prosecutors alleged that Bing received bribes totalling over 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) from various IT companies.

Almost half of the money, 4.2 million yuan ($630,000) came from a Chinese antivirus company called Rising, which grew very fast in recent years and currently accounts for around 50% of the local consumer market.

In 2005, a company called Micropoint, which had former Rising employees Liu Xu and Tian Yakui as president and vice-president, was on the verge of launching a host intrusion prevention system (HIPS).

Such security software is different from a traditional antivirus product, because it detects and blocks malicious activity by monitoring the behavior of applications running on the system.

Bing ordered two lower-ranking PSB officers to convince two companies to file false complaints that they've been attacked by viruses and suffered losses of 100,000 yuan.

Then he ordered an expertise to determine if the viruses originated from Tian Yakui's laptop. The experts returned an "inconclusive" report, but Bing changed it to "certain" and had Yakui arrested.

The Micropoint vice-president spent the next 11 months in jail while his family filed a complaint against Yu Bing. When he realized that his actions will be discovered, Bing fled to South Africa.

In September 2008, the Chinese authorities persuaded him to return to the country and face the trial. According to Naked Security, he pleaded guilty to all charges and admitted to fabricating evidence against Yakui.

Micropoint president Liu Xu says that because the product was not launched on schedule, his company lost up to 30 million yuan ($4.5 million), money which he plans to obtain in court as damages.

Bing is probably not going to be executed, as suspended death penalties are usually commuted to life in prison. Meanwhile, Rising has denied any involvement in the case.