A new academic study has set out to illuminate for the first time the size and structure of the Chinese online underground, and found it affected nearly a quarter of the country’s internet users last year and cost the economy over 5 billion yuan (£500m).
Investigating China’s Online Underground Economy was put together by researchers at California University’s Institute on Global Conflict and Co-operation to highlight the scale and sophistication of China’s cyber black market and to aid global collaboration efforts against hi-tech crime.
The report claims that in 2011 the online underground involved over 90,000 participants, costing the local economy 5.36 billion yuan (£536bn), making victims of 110m internet users (roughly 22 per cent) and affecting 1.1m web sites (20 per cent).
To calculate these figures, the report used stats provided by the major local security vendors, court room documents detailing high profile cases and messages from the underground markets themselves which were relatively easy to track down on certain public web platforms.
Link to the research : http://igcc.ucsd.edu/assets/001/503677.pdf
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/18/baidu_tencent_used_by_chinese_cyber_crims/
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