China's cyber security under severe threat: report

BEIJING, March 19 (Xinhua) -- China's cyber security has come under increasingly severe threats amid a variety of safety risks, according to a report released Tuesday by a national computer monitoring center.

Hackers tampered with 16,388 web pages in China -- including 1,802 government websites -- in the past year, up 6.1 percent and 21.4 percent year on year respectively, a National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center (CNCERT) report said.

In 2012, around 73,000 overseas Internet Protocol (IP) addresses were involved in hijacking nearly 14.2 million mainframes in China via Trojan or Botnet, with the United States being the largest source of such hacking activities.

The CNCERT said it monitored 22,308 phishing websites targeting China's growing online population last year, which has grown to 564 million.

Up to 96.2 percent of the phishing websites are running on foreign severs, with U.S.-based sites accounting for 83.2 percent of them, according to the report.

Zhou Yonglin, a CNCERT official, noted that new security risks will gradually emerge with the application of new technologies such as cloud computing, complicating the center's efforts to trace cyber attacks.

He urged the country's related institutions to pool research efforts to enhance cyber security protection.

While China itself is a victim of cyber crimes, the country has recently come under frequent criticisms from other countries, including the United States, which claimed the Chinese government was behind some hacking activities targeting their countries.

Reiterating China's stance of opposing any forms of hacking, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said last week the country hopes to discuss the issue with the Unites States and called for the international community to join efforts to fight hacking.

"China resolutely opposes hacking of any form and would like to communicate with the United States on cyberspace security in a constructive way," she said.

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