Taiwan's Taipei District Prosecutors Office has indicted four former staff of the National Institute of Cyber Security for building a scraping tool that broke into the institute's own internal systems — an embarrassing breach for the government body meant to protect national cybersecurity.

• Hsu Shih-chang, a former R&D director at the institute, allegedly ordered a researcher to build a "crawler" program that exploited a flaw in the institute's website to pull data from its document, personnel, and workflow systems.
• The motive was internal frustration: Hsu wanted to build a better system for tracking project budgets, was turned down by the institute's president, and went around the refusal by scraping the data directly.
• The tool ran for months, connecting to the systems over 200,000 times at an interval of a few seconds, and was made available to staff in Hsu's center.
• The four face charges under Taiwan's personal data protection law and computer crime laws, including unauthorized access, taking electronic records, and creating a program designed to interfere with computer use.
• Prosecutors say no data leaked outside the institute, and are asking the court for lighter sentences if the four confess, citing clean records and a lapse in judgment rather than malicious intent.

Outlook: The case heads to trial, and the institute — set up in 2023 under Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs — faces questions about how its own staff could exploit a hole in its systems for so long undetected.