BEIJING - A computer security official said China has become the world's biggest victim of cyber attacks, with a report from a national computer monitoring center revealing that many domestic computers were controlled via overseas-based Internet Protocol addresses (IPs) last year.

A total of 47,000 overseas IPs were involved in attacks against 8.9 million Chinese computers last year, compared to nearly 5 million affected computers in 2010, according to a report issued Monday by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC), China's primary computer security monitoring network.

Most of the IP addresses originated in Japan, the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK), according to the agency.

"China has become the world's biggest victim of cyber attacks," said Zhou Yonglin, an information security official from the Internet Society of China.

In terms of website security, a total of 1,116 domestic websites were tampered with by overseas-based hackers; in addition, 95.8 percent of the server IPs that maliciously falsified the websites of domestic banks were also based overseas, according to the report.

"Generally speaking, malicious IPs based in the US, Japan and the ROK posed the greatest security threat to China last year," said Wang Minghua, vice director of the CNCERT/CC's operations department.

Zhou said the CNCERT will deepen its cooperation with other countries in computer security. The CNCERT has established cooperative relations with 40 countries and 79 organizations thus far.