Taiwan cybersecurity institute deputy director indicted over 207,938 document scrapes and Azure LLM use
Prosecutors in Taipei have indicted four people tied to Taiwan’s National Institute of Cyber Security, including deputy director Hsu Shih-chang of its forward-looking research and procurement center, over allegations that they exploited internal system flaws to scrape official documents, personnel data, and workflow forms 207,938 times over nine months. According to the indictment, some of the scraped documents were then sent to Microsoft Azure’s large language model API to analyze procurement amounts and expected reimbursement schedules. Prosecutors said the scraping activity accounted for 85% of all document reads by institute staff and was used to build an internal budget system called XMAS. The case also alleges that after the institute cut VPN connectivity between internal and external networks in May 2025, one of the defendants used an institute-issued internal laptop with Cloudflare Tunnel to keep the crawler connected. Prosecutors said the scraped material included personal data and some classified documents, but added that there is currently no evidence the information was leaked to anyone outside current or former institute employees.
