China claims to be world's top hacking target

China claims that 262,000 of its IP addresses were hit by Trojans last year

A Chinese government official has said that his country is the world's leading target for hacking attacks.

Zhou Yonglin, deputy chief of the operations department of the China National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT) said in an interview with state media that China suffers more hacking attacks than any other country.

"Compared with [internet security issues in] the US, Japan and the Republic of Korea, it is very serious in China," he said.

Zhou explained that 262,000 IP addresses in China were hit by Trojans last year, planted by nearly 165,000 overseas IP addresses. "Those from the US ranked first, accounting for 16.61 per cent," he said.

Zhou also denied any knowledge of the hacking attacks on Google that started the company's conflict with the Chinese authorities. However, Google has apparently presented no evidence to CNCERT about the attacks.

"We have been hoping that Google will contact us so that we could have details on this issue and provide them help if necessary," he said.

CNCERT is working actively with the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team and others to cut down on attacks, according to Zhou.

He cited a case last year when the Chinese authorities alerted the US about two US-registered domain names that were planting Trojans on hundreds of Chinese web sites.