Chinese institutions attacked by overseas hackers

BEIJING - China's Internet security watchdog said Sunday that a growing number of Chinese public institutions and companies have been threatened by cyber attacks from other countries or regions.

The popular news portal China.com.cn, people.com.cn and Tibet.cn have all been victims of attack from foreign Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in the past two months, according to a report issued by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center (CNCERT/CC).

A total of 85 websites of public institutions and companies were hacked from September 2012 to February 2013, including government agencies, a provincial examination authority, a property insurance company and a virus research facility in central China, according to the report.

It noted that attacks on 39 of those websites were recorded from IPs within the United States.

From November 2012 to January 2013, the China National Vulnerability Database also recorded 5,792 hacking attempts from US IP addresses, said the report.

Moreover, in the past two months, 6,747 overseas servers were found to use Trojan or botnets to control nearly 1.9 million mainframes in China, and 2,194 of these servers were located in the US, making it the largest point of origin of cyber attacks against China, said the report.

In addition, it said that 96 percent of phishing sites targeting Chinese e-commerce users were running on foreign servers, with US-based servers hosting 73.1 percent.

In early February, several US news organizations claimed to have been victims of Chinese hackers. Some even accused the Chinese government of supporting such attacks.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of National Defense promptly refuted the accusations and reiterated China's resolve in combating cyber crimes.