Chinese authorities shut down hacker training website

In Hubei Province of China, three people were arrested on suspicion of owning and managing the Black Hawk Safety Net site (3800hk.com). BHSN is a huge website that provided visitors with paid and free training sessions on hacking websites and writing viruses, allowing them to download malware and much more. In addition to the three arrests, nine servers, five computers and one car were also confiscated. This was reported yesterday by China Daily and Wuhan Evening News.

Hacking is a sore subject for China, especially since recently, when Google accused the Chinese government of attempting to crack Google’s servers under their authority (the Government, naturally, denies this fact).

Black Hawk Safety Net was very popular. At least 12 thousand users had paid accounts, which allowed the site to collect more than 7 million yuan (about one million dollars). In addition, about 170 thousand users had “free” accounts. The Hubei Provincial Government has not yet given any comments.

The Black Hawk Safety Net site is currently unavailable, but users and people close to others in other forums claim that the site’s back-ups have been preserved and have not been confiscated, so at least the owners of “paid” accounts won't lose anything.
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The BBC spokesman in Beijing, Damian Grammaticas, argues that there is no connection between this case and attacks on Google (as well as a search engine statement about a possible departure from China). At least, at the moment it is not detected.
However, who knows, maybe this is an attempt by the Chinese government to prove to Google that they care and they are vigorously fighting hackers.