The State Department confirmed today that it had been notified by the government of Singapore that Dade Murphy, CTO of Dragonfire Cyber, had been arrested at the request of the Chinese government for cyber fraud. An extradition hearing is scheduled for later this week for his transfer to Beijing for trial on those charges. Murphy was in Singapore to meet with local customers when he was arrested at his hotel.
Nelson T. Johnson a Department spokesperson told reporters that an Embassy representative has spoken with Murphy and there have been no complaints about mistreatment or violations of human rights. “Murphy has engaged a local defense team to represent him in these proceedings and the Legal Attaché will be present at the hearing to represent the interests of the United States and insure that Murphy gets a fair hearing,” Johnson told reporters.
A statement released by the Chinese embassy in San Francisco states that Murphy is being charged under Chinese computer fraud statutes that are very similar to 18 USC 1030, the United States computer fraud statute. Prosecutors in Guangzhou, China provided evidence to the local People’s Tribunal related to a cyber intrusion conducted by Dade Murphy and people under his control into a computer server located in local company in that city. According to the resulting indictment, Murphy or people under his supervision, stole data from that server, modified data for financial gain and have publicly exposed personally identifiable information obtained from that server. If convicted on all of the charges Murphy could face 20 years in a Chinese prison.
A spokesman for Dragonfire Cyber told reporters that the company has been in touch with Dade and he is in high spirits and expects this issue to be resolved shortly. The spokesman said: “The company is not prepared at this time to discuss the charges for which Murphy was arrested.”
A person at Dragonfire not authorized to talk to reporters told me that the charges are apparently related to the release of a recent report published by the Company about recent attacks by the NoReturn group operating out of China. The report provided detailed information about the server which was being used by the NoReturn group in their attacks on American companies seeking to return manufacturing operations to the United States. Computers attached to that server were used both for command and control purposes as well as the source for a variety of phishing emails used to initiate their attacks.
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