China claimed on Tuesday that it was hit by nearly 500,000 cyber attacks last year,
The South China Morning Post is a Hong Kong-based English newspaper published by the SCMP group.
Out of half a million cyber attacks reported by China, nearly half of the attacks originated from overseas countries which included United States and India as the main perpetrators.
According to a government report, most of the attacks on China came in the form of Trojan software - a malicious programme that masquerades as an application, Xinhua News Agency reported.
National Computer Network Emergency Response Co-ordination Centre reports that nearly 15 percent of the destructive programmes came from IP addresses in the United States while 8 percent originated in India.
This news comes amidst the latest information provided by McAfee, a computer security company, who discovered an unprecedented series of cyber attacks on networks of 72 global organizations, including the United Nations, governments and corporations over a period of five years. And the main state actor behind these attacks according to many security experts points towards China. United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada, including defense contractors to high tech enterprises have been affected by these attacks.
“Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organisations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators.” He further stated “What is happening to all this data … is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation, the loss represents a massive economic threat,” voicing concern over the hacking, McAfee vice president of threat research Dmitri Alperovitch said.
But China refuted the claim through People’s Daily, an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China that “Linking China to the Internet hacking attacks is irresponsible.”
“The McAfee report claims that a ‘state actor’ engaged in hacking for a large-scale Internet espionage operation, but its analysis clearly does not stand up to scrutiny.”
Even Google in early June suspected mainland hackers being responsible for stealing passwords of hundreds of Google e-mail account holders which included those of U.S. government officials, China rights activists and journalists. There again People’s Daily acted as the closest to an official response saying that Google had become a political tool used to defame the government in Beijing and warned that U.S. Internet giant’s statements could hurt its business.
Also Jay Carney, White House spokesman earlier stated that U.S. President Barack Obama viewed cyber security as a top priority and was working to tighten the defenses of both the government and private sector
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