Extraordinary Genius

That evening, Feng Yu saw some of Sohu’s forums were temporarily taken offline for maintenance. The other forums were also cleansed.

The tech department thought of an idea to manage their forums. They could engage Qiandu to develop a keyword search program highlighting the moderators if some keywords appeared. These posts or threads will be moderated manually.

The moderator will be responsible for the forum under his care. If there are problems with the forum, the moderators for that forum will be penalized. Of course, with penalties, there will be rewards. If the advertisements for that forum exceeded their target, the moderators would get bonuses.

All forums will have “sticky” posts reminding users that it is illegal to post explicit content in China. The company will trace the IP address and hand they over to the Police.

In 1994, China had already set up their internet police department. From 1995 onwards, every city’s police force will have an officer in charge of online crimes. But at that time, not many officers know about PCs, and this is a powerless department.

But from this year onwards, Feng Yu knew Lenovo had received orders for several large servers and high-performance PCs. The Chinese Police force also hired several Computer Major professionals as officers. This is mainly because a group of hackers had appeared recently. These hackers called themselves Red Hacker Alliance and specialized in attacking other countries’ government websites for fun.

Some of these hackers joined the Internet Police. They used the Chinese government funds to set up cybersecurity for the government. After all, the Chinese government is also afraid of hackers.

The Red Hacker Alliance even recruited their members openly online.

If Liu Chuanzhi did not tell Feng Yu about the hackers, Feng Yu did not know about them. Those so-call “Hackers” might be skilled, but they cannot penetrate the defenses of high-performance cybersecurity equipment.

It is just like online games. Your level might be high, but your enemy is wearing extremely good gear. No matter how you hit your enemy, you cannot damage them. How are you going to win?

After doing all these, Sohu was even awarded a certificate of appreciation by the Chinese government.

After Zhang Chaoyang implemented all these measures, Feng Yu is satisfied. He is called Zhang Chaoyang. “Eh, do you know about the Red Hacker Alliance?”

Zhang Chaoyang was surprised by Feng Yu’s question. “Manager Feng, why are you asking me this? I am not a member of this alliance. Furthermore, this alliance specialized in exploiting internet loopholes to attack. This is not something I am good at.”

“I am not talking about you. If our website is under attack, can you all handle it?”

“That will depend on how many hackers are attacking us. If it is only one or two hackers, our equipment is enough to handle it. But if there are seven to eight hackers, our websites might have to be taken down for a while.” Zhang Chaoyang replied.

Those Red Hackers are so powerful, and they should be working for me. They are the best people to take charge of our internet security.

In the casinos, many of the managers are formerly gambling experts or cheats. They are the best people to catch cheats.

“Are you sure if you don’t know anyone of them? Manager Zhang, it’s fine to tell me, and I will not tell others. I hope to hire them to take charge of our online security.”

“Why would hackers attack our websites? Hackers will not attack websites randomly and will only hack other websites for a reason. If not, they will be arrested easily.”

“Who knows what will happen in the future? What if some hackers develop a virus that goes out of control?” Feng Yu suddenly remembered the “Grey Pigeon” virus. This is one of the top ten viruses for three consecutive years.

After that, some people changed the virus into a trojan and made many different types of variations.

Zhang Chaoyang replied. “Maybe Qiu Bojun or Lei Dajun might know those hackers. You can try asking them.”

“Are you saying that they had tried recruiting the hackers?”

“I am only guessing, and I don’t know anything about this.” Zhang Chaoyang replied.

“Alright. I will ask them later. Oh, I have something to discuss with you. I think Sohu, Sina, NetEase, Qiandu, Tencent, etc. can cooperate to promote each other’s products and share your technologies. This will be good for all parties.”

“We are cooperating in many areas. Our search engine uses Qiandu, and we are also advertising for Tencent’s QQ, NetEase’s Legend of Mir, and Sina’s microblogs. Isn’t this considered cooperation?” Zhang Chaoyang asked curiously.

“This cooperation is only on the surface. I registered an account in our forum yesterday, and I only need to provide an account number, password, and nick.”

“That’s right. No one likes to use their real identity online, and they prefer to use all sorts of interesting nicks.”

“What if they forgot their password?”

“They can register a new account or used their password recovery option.”

Huh? Password recovery option? Feng Yu did not notice about this yesterday.

“Then you should make it compulsory for the users. You don’t need to set complicated questions, or the user might forget after a few days. You can also use other options to recover the user’s password. For example, the mobile phone number. You can work with a telecommunication company to send a verification code to the users. Another option is to use email. You can work with NetEase and get them to send a verification email to the users. The user can use the verification code to change their password. Lastly, you ask the user for their QQ to send verification codes to the users.”

“Don’t think that you will suffer losses by doing these. You can ask for a commission from the telecommunication company. Their cost for doing this is not high, and we will be increasing their profits. As for emails and QQ, you can also charge them advertising fees.”

Zhang Chaoyang was impressed. “Manager Feng, you are so smart. This way, Sohu’s profits will increase a lot!”

Translator’s notes:

Grey Pigeon is a virus that hackers will plant on various websites. Visitors to these websites will be infected with a trojan that will steal their user IDs and passwords.

Red Hacker Alliance