Police-confiscated forged stamps and documents
If you want to do anything official in China, you’re going to need some stamps. Red-ink official “chops” adorn almost every kind of important document, and chances are if it doesn’t have a stamp, Chinese officials aren’t going to accept it. For that reason, some criminals in China do a brisk trade in forged stamps. But making it look official isn’t always easy, and one gang apparently went the extra mile for their customers, hacking and tampering with 185 different government websites nationwide to make their stamps appear more official and to assuage customers’ concerns by making their company appear to be legitimate. So far, police have arrested 165 suspects and confiscated more than 10,000 fake stamps and 7,100 fake certificates of various kinds.
Although it’s good that the criminals will be brought to justice, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this sort of thing is pretty easy to do and will probably happen again. Last year we wrote about how many Chinese government sites haven’t been updated in years and it’s hard to believe there’s much security in place if a gang of stamp-forgers was able to penetrate so many websites and insert links to their own sites or tamper with content in other ways. Indeed, Jieyang police captain Chen Xiaoping told the Beijing Times that the “security level” of these government sites was even lower than that of commercial sites like Tianya and Kaixin, which have previously experienced security leaks.
In addition to apparently being easily hackable and rarely updated, many government websites are a design nightmare and feature a horrible user experience that makes it difficult to find useful information. In light of this latest news, I think the government ought to mandate an overhaul to all government sites, not only to make them more secure but to make them more usable for regular people looking for basic information. Secure, functional websites would benefit everyone, and hopefully would make it more difficult for criminals to use government sites for profit like this.
[Beijing Times via Sina Tech]
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