Recently there has been a lot of speculation that China was behind a major cyber attack on international organizations. (Read about that here). China has protested these accusations and now the Chinese government has come out with charges that Chinese computers were also targeted by hackers. From Time:
Nearly 500,000 cyberattacks were aimed at computers in China last year and almost half originated overseas, the government said Tuesday, following recent suggestions Beijing might be behind long-term security attacks internationally.
The vast majority of the attacks a Chinese monitoring agency reported were in the form of Trojan horse malware that installs on computers, allowing them to monitor usage and access personal information.
Of those Trojan horse attacks, 14.7 percent of those were traced to IP addresses in the United States and 8 percent in India.
The findings were reported on the website of the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China.
In related news, the DPP opposition party in Taiwan has also charged that their accounts have been targeted by hackers, some of whom trace back to China. From Taipei Times:
Hackers from China and Taiwan have accessed the e-mail accounts of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) officials and senior staff at the party’s presidential campaign office, stealing confidential campaign information, the DPP said yesterday.
“The e-mail accounts were accessed by IP [Internet Protocol] addresses in China and Taiwan, with an IP address from the Beijing Bureau of China’s state-controlled Xinhua news agency making an attack via Australia and Xinhua’s Malaysian bureau,” DPP spokesman Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) said.
The DPP said the “confidential campaign information” that was compromised includes the minutes of internal meetings and DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) presidential campaign itinerary.
Chen said that while attacks from China were not surprising, an attack was traced to a domestic IP address belonging to the Executive Yuan’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission.
The campaign office reported the case to the National Police Agency on Monday, but received a lukewarm response, Hsu said, adding that a police official told the office not to “make a stink over nothing.”
