Police in central China have arrested three people and seized money and equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in a crackdown on the country’s biggest commercial operation to train computer hackers, state media reported over the past two days.
But Western specialists in cybersecurity were skeptical that the arrests signified any broad commitment by China to halt the assaults on computer security that Google and other Western companies have endured in recent months.
China has not shut down the well-known servers that have been used in these attacks or arrested their operators, so the detention of three people in central China is unlikely to make much of a difference, said Ronald J. Deibert, a cybersecurity expert at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto.
“Their crackdown on this apparent hacker group needs to be placed in a broader context,” Mr. Deibert said. “I would characterize it as window dressing.”
Public security officers in Hubei province also shut down a Web site said to be used to raise more than $1 million in membership fees from 12,000 paying members, according to the Wuhan Evening Post in Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei. The members received software tools for penetrating computer security systems and online accounts.
The Web site, the Black Hawk Safety Net, was started in 2005 and had another 170,000 free members, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported on Monday.
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