A great article by James Areddy in The Wall Street Journal describes how the China hacker community is very different from the Hollywood stereotypes of loner American geeks or steely Russian mobsters.

China's hackers are not very good, according to one of Areddy's sources, but there are many of them. As a result, they throw manpower at a problem.

How do China's hackers organize themselves?

In China's hacking community, each person does a specific job and, rather than working for a big score, gets paid piecemeal by selling his work, cybersecurity experts say. The programmer of malicious programs usually assembles his program, as Mr. Li did, with lines of computer code he bought elsewhere. The operation works like an assembly line: The programmer then makes customers of others who pay to undertake the broader attack, spreading the malicious software, triggering it and sharing the payoff.

"The chain business is uniquely Chinese," says a Chinese security expert for a major U.S. technology company in Shanghai. Hacker conspiracies in China are structured like multi-level sales networks and even pyramid schemes, he said, not tight-knit criminal gangs that write "technically clean" code designed from the ground up.

Hacker "crowd sourcing"â€"when large numbers of people contribute to writing code and executing itâ€"reduces the risks individuals face and leaves the network intact if someone does get caught or a forum is shut, Internet security experts say.

How do China's hackers get training?

Like most Chinese hackers, Mr. Li says he was nurtured inside the informal but active network of online chat rooms where technology break-ins are plotted. According to hackers and Internet security people, such forums are little more than criminal training schools and hardware stores, a cyber underworld where the locks on technological secrets that power online games, bank Websites and Apple Inc.'s iPhone undergo brutal stress tests from the world's largest Internet population.

To sidestep laws against selling malicious software, programmers euphemistically advertise their hacks as "training" and "tutoring," hackers say. Would-be distributors tout themselves as "mail senders," while "script kiddies," keen to build an underworld reputation, will buy hacker tools and pull the trigger.

The full article tells the tale of 27-year old hacker Li Jun and the havoc he wreaked in 2006 and 2007 with the Panda Burns Incense computer worm.