Chinese Internet operators and administrators have been warned to be aware of hacker attacks and reminded of the need for Internet security by an official with the Computer Network and Information Security Management Office, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
Nearly 14 percent of all hacker attacks that happened in April across the world were targeted at Chinese mainland websites, said the official, who did not give his name.
Among the several hundreds of Chinese websites attacked, 54 percent were commercial, 12 percent official and 19 percent education and scientific research websites, the official said.
According to Internet experts, in April, there was an increase in reports of probing and scanning by would-be intruders seeking to find security cracks in systems that could be compromised.
An average of 100 sites a day have seen some form of attack, ranging from Web page defacements to takeovers by intruders, a more frequent occurrence than normal.
Owing to a lack of special technicians, some defaced Chinese websites were not mended immediately, Internet experts said.
To protect Chinese websites from further hacker attacks, Internet security experts have been asked to conduct 24-hour system surveillance. Internet security companies have been urged to provide aid and consultation service to Net users, said the official with the Computer Network and Information Security Management Office.
The official asked Internet users to report hacker attacks to the China Computer Network Emergency Centre at www.cert.org.cn.
Anti-virus software companies have urged users to update programmes to protect their computers.
Triggered by the Sino-US plane collision, there have been increasing mutual hacker attacks on websites of the two countries in the past week, according to Xinhua and major website news reports.
A Xinhua Web report said as many as 700 official and non-governmental websites from both countries were hacked on April 30 and May 1.
Of them, 600 were from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, and the other 100 or so were from the United States.
Chinese experts attributed this to the lack of safety measures taken by most Chinese portal administrators.
US experts said the Chinese attackers, who they believe to be acting independently, were apparently provoked by indiscriminate US attacks on Chinese websites.
(China Daily 05/04/2001)
