Singapore's state courts have fined a security engineer for Chinese company Tencent Holdings about $3,600 for hacking into the servers of the hotel he was staying at last month.
Zheng Dutao, 23, was sentenced to a fine instead of the original sentence of 25 days in prison. The reason for the sentence was the violation of the servers of the hotel chain (Fragrance Hotels) where he was staying for a few days.
In a court hearing held for his case, he pleaded guilty to intentionally revealing the security code used by the hotel, gaining unauthorized access to critical chain files within its server.
The investigation revealed that Zheng arrived at the hotel on August 27. The next day, “out of curiosity,” he scanned the hotel’s internal wifi network for any potential vulnerabilities. With the help of Google, he was able to identify the system the hotel was using, as well as the default credentials (username and password).
After confirming that the default credentials were still valid, he gained access to the hotel system. Over the next 3 days, he executed scripts, decrypted files, and cracked existing security codes, reaching his ultimate target, a database.
Then, on his own blog, he made a new blog post mentioning his achievement, as well as the sequence of steps he followed to reach his final result. Along with the steps, he also published the hotel codes that he had broken. Finally, he shared his blog post in a WhatsApp group chat with many members.
The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore discovered the article and immediately notified the hotel management. It also contacted Zheng and asked him to delete the article, which he did.
The hotel reported the breach to police on September 1, according to a report by Yahoo. Zheng has been posting about system vulnerabilities in his blog since 2014, but this was the first time he had documented a discovery of his own.
