Xiang Li

Xiang Li is a Chinese computer hacker. He is serving a twelve-year sentence in federal prison in the United States.

Early life Li was born in Chengdu, China in 1979.

Career From Chengdu, he operated "CRACK99", a website that sold stolen software globally from 2008 until his arrest by U.S. authorities in 2011. During that time, he sold over $100 million in industrial-grade software, the access controls of which had been circumvented by software cracking. The software had civilian and military applications, including aerospace and aviation simulation and design, communications systems design, electromagnetic simulation, explosives simulation, intelligence analysis, precision tooling, oil field management, and manufacturing plant design.

Operation, arrest and prosecution

Investigation One of the software titles for sale on CRACK99 was "Satellite Tool Kit 8.0" ("STK"), now known as Systems Tool Kit, designed by Analytical Graphics Incorporated (AGI) to enable the U.S. military to simulate missile launches and flight trajectories of aircraft and satellites. AGI brought this fact to the attention of U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations in December 2009. A team of prosecutors and agents from the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service initiated an undercover investigation in 2010. As part of that investigation, federal agents purchased STK software from the CRACK99 website, as well as other advanced software used in spacecraft design and programmable logic devices.

In June 2013, the court held a sentencing hearing. Li contended that software piracy was "prevalent" in China, opining that "robably ten million people in China are doing things illegally with software." The U.S. government agreed that cyber theft is prevalent in China, but contended that the prevalence of Chinese piracy is not a defense, and pointed the court to a report estimating that China's illegal software market reached $9 billion in 2011, out of a total market of nearly $12 billion, thus setting a piracy rate of 77 percent. The government emphasized the advanced nature of the software sold by Li and the fact that many of the software products had military applications. The court found that the software was "highly sophisticated" and "ended up with individuals and sometimes in countries that are not authorized to have those software materials".

Another U.S. customer was Cosburn Wedderburn, who purchased over $1,000,000 in stolen software. At the time, Wedderburn was a NASA engineer.