SINGAPORE: Three men from Henan, China, came to Singapore for a job offer posed by a Ni-Vanuatu citizen and were later housed in a bungalow to perform hacking work into gambling websites and obtain illicit access to a Chinese SMS service company.

The men were later paid US$3 million (S$3.9 million) in cryptocurrency for their work.

A police raid of the Mount Sinai bungalow they were living in uncovered malware-related files on their devices, including remote access trojans (RATs) associated with plugX and a known hacking group, Shadow Brokers.

plugX is a sophisticated RAT associated with known advanced persistent threat or state-sponsored hacker groups, while the Shadow Brokers are a hacker group that has stolen and leaked tools and zero-day vulnerabilities from the United States' National Security Agency.

The leaking of one such zero-day vulnerability enabled the subsequent WannaCry ransomware attacks from 2017 onwards.

While the hackers attempted to avoid government sites, one of their laptops contained messages discussing vulnerable domains, including five Australian, Argentine and Vietnamese government domains, while another contained a confidential email between officers of Kazakhstan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development.

The three Chinese criminals are Yan Peijian, 39, Huang Qin Zheng, 36, and Liu Yuqi, 33.

On Wednesday (Nov 5), Yan and Huang were sentenced to 28 months and one week in prison, and Liu got 28 months and four weeks' jail.

When a prison sentence is imposed that combines months with four weeks or more, CNA reports the sentences as spelt out by the court as months vary in length.

THE CASE

Yan had a background in information technology, previously running a business creating websites for companies, while Liu taught himself web design.

In 2022, there were bad economic prospects in China as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The trio, who knew each other, knew a 38-year-old Ni-Vanuatu citizen called Xu Liangbiao.

He made an offer for them to come to Singapore to work for him, and they agreed to it.

Xu arranged for false applications for work permits to be made for the trio through companies that they did not know about. Yan was to be a sales representative, and Huang and Liu were to be construction workers.

They entered Singapore on fraudulently obtained work permits, which they did not know at the ti...