DPP's cyber front nothing but a damp squib

The Chinese mainland's national security ministry said on Monday that a Taiwan military-backed hacking group called Anonymous 64 has been carrying out cyberattacks against targets in China. It urged people to report "anti-propaganda sabotage".

"We advocate that netizens should not believe in or spread rumors and should promptly report cyberattacks or cases of anti-propaganda activity to the national security authorities," the ministry said in a blog post.

The security ministry published screenshots of the group's X account with heavily redacted text. It also said it had opened a case against three members of Taiwan's cyber warfare wing. Taiwan island's "defense ministry" responded by claiming Beijing's accusations were "untrue".

Anonymous 64 registered accounts on social networking sites in order to attack websites on the mainland. However, it did a clumsy job, managing to attack mostly websites which had few visitors. Some of the few "achievements" they could boast of were achieved by photoshopping the images of pages they visited.

On Aug 2, when the website of a small internet enterprise on the mainland suffered a cyberattack, Anonymous 64 claimed it had "controlled online forums of 40 mainland colleges", but that was because the website itself was linked to those 40 colleges.

Anonymous 64, as well as the 1450 Internet Army, which was so nicknamed because the Democratic Progressive Party authorities' "agricultural committee" set a budget of 14.50 million NTD ($452,640) in 2019 to recruit staff with the intention of "strengthening information response", which have proved to be a total waste of manpower and money.

In June 2017 the DPP authorities founded the "Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command" as the "fourth branch" of the island's "armed forces". This was further incorporated under the "ministry of defense" in 2022.