RACINE - On Nov. 21, a Chinese hacker posted his most recent achievement on http://cnhacker.com, a site dedicated to the China Hacker Union.

Name81 listed 31 Web sites that he had hacked, all hosted right here in the Belle City.

The hacked pages carried this message - "Hello USA! Please do not sell to Taiwan dog bones! Do not push China sells nuclear missiles to Iran! Do you understand? From China: Name81." The hacker, rather than taking over the front pages of the sites, added a hidden page that could only be found by someone who knew it was there.

The hacks got Scott Henderson's attention. Henderson, 43, runs http://thedarkvisitor.com, a Web site devoted to tracking Chinese hackers. Henderson wrote about the attacks on his site, listing the URLs for the hacked sites, naming companies such as Carlson Roofing, Racine Lutheran High School, Century21 and Beardsley Flagpole.

Henderson said he contacted the service provider to let them know about the hacks, but didn't hear back from them. Last weekend, he went back to check on things. When he found the hacks still up and running, Henderson wanted to do something, so he started making calls.

Henderson called six of the hacked businesses to let them know what he had discovered. Most weren't particularly interested in hearing what he had to say, and hung up on him.

"When you start out a conversation (saying) that 'you've been hacked by Chinese hackers,' people have a tendency to be a little skeptical of the conversation," Henderson said. One place listened to what he had to say, and they started to get things fixed. By Feb. 6, all but one of the hacks listed was removed. The one that remained was attached to Lutheran High School's Web site.

Many of the attacked sites are hosted by Network Specialists of Racine. Chuck Christoffersen, president of the company, said they became aware of the hacks in October, but without knowing specifically where to look to find the bad files, there wasn't much he could do about it.

"We don't write the application or that Web page, so we don't know what the files are," Christoffersen said. "If they put something on there, there's nothing much we can do until we can locate the file. There can be literally hundreds of pages within a Web site, and they can call it whatever they want."

Christoffersen said he believes Name81 got in by hacking a few people's too-obvious passwords.

"We know one we were aware of, they got in through the FTP site, and it's because they had very generic passwords set up on their site," he said. "One of the easiest ways to get hacked is to have a simplistic password like password, admin, 1234. It's not unusual for a tech to sit down at somebody's desk and figure out someone's password by asking a few questions."

Henderson said that even though these were hidden attacks, it still bothers him.

"I get irritated," he said. "They're trying to run a business. It's a little humorous, but by the same token, if someone broke into your house you still feel violated."

That indignation keeps Henderson working on his hacker hobby. He said he spends several hours each day trying to find information about hackers, translating it and putting it up on his site. "Certainly it has aspects of national security, security for industry, and in this case, for individual citizens' security," Henderson said. "I do feel (researching hackers) is worthwhile. I don't see these guys stopping, and they're getting a little more sophisticated every year."

Henderson became interested in Chinese hackers when he was working for the government.

"I'm actually retired Army," Henderson said. "I did a project for the government researching Chinese hackers and it sort of became a hobby of mine. I liked it so much and thought it was important."

He said he doesn't think we really understand what's going on with these hackers.

"If you read a lot of the headlines in newspapers it seems there's an amorphous group that appears, attacks U.S. Web sites and disappears," he said. "The truth is they're very open in China. There's literally hundreds of hacker Web sites and they post thousands of documents saying what they're doing, the defacements they've done … they're rock stars in China."

Henderson estimates there are about 380,000 people who consider themselves Chinese hackers. "They're in a pyramid situation," he said. "They want fame, fortune. They're selling T-shirts and trying to get movie deals. If you do a famous hack it may be a lead to a lucrative position inside a computer company."