Defense Ministry website still under intense attack

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A chief editor with the official website of China's Ministry of National Defense (MOD), www.mod.gov.cn, said Tuesday the site still receives thousands of overseas-based hacking attacks everyday after more than six months of trial operations.

The website of Defense Ministry. [File photo]

"Although the number of hacking attacks has declined since the first month of trial operations, we are still attacked by Internet hackers everyday," Ji Guilin, chief editor of the ministry's website, told Xinhua.

However, Mr. Ji refused to release a specific total number of hacking attacks so far or the major sources or origins of those attacks due to the sensitive nature of the issue.

But he said most of the overseas visitors to the website's Chinese pages were tracked to IP addresses registered in the US, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Canada. While most of the overseas visits to the English pages were tracked to the US, Australia and the United Kingdom.

The MOD website was unveiled in August last year, an effort, in many analysts' views, by the Chinese government and the 2.3-million-strong People's Liberation Army (PLA) to increase military transparency.

Ji said the website experienced more than 2.3 million attacks by hackers within its first month of operation, most of which attempted to penetrate the site's computer systems and change its homepage.

The website's claims of Internet hacking attacks echoed a military official's comment last month on allegations of the Chinese government's involvement into cyber attacks on foreign companies.

Defense Ministry spokesman Huang Xueping said Chinese networks, especially the military information network, had been a major target for Internet hackers.

The uniformed officer's remark came after former US intelligence officials said the Chinese military was recruiting Internet hackers to break into US government and company computer networks.

Prof. Tan Kaijia, of the PLA's National Defense University, told Xinhua that Chinese military facilities had been targeted by hackers who tried all means to tap into their Internet-wired computers.

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