China claims it is the most attacked country

Despite being tarred with the cyber-attacking brush, China has reportedly become the world's biggest victim of cyber attacks.

According to a report by the People's Daily Online, many domestic computers were controlled via overseas-based IP addresses last year. A report by China's primary computer security monitoring network, the National Computer Network Emergency Response Co-ordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC), said 47,000 overseas IP addresses were interested in attacks against 8.9 million Chinese computers last year.

It claimed that almost all of the IP addresses originated in Japan, the u. s. and South Korea. It also said that 1,116 domestic websites were tampered with by overseas-based hackers.

Zhou Yonglin, a data security official from the web Society of China, told the People's Daily Online that "China has become the world's biggest victim of cyber attacks".

Speaking on the Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in London last year, China's ambassador to the united kingdom, Liu Xiaoming, said China is the victim of cyber crime and never the criminal.

He said: “China has seen a rise within the variety of cyber crimes in recent times. Hacking into networks is at the rise â€" statistics show that cyber crime rose by 340 times between 1998 and 2009. About 60 per cent of military websites faced a safety threat of varying degree in 2010.” The video of his speech could be viewed here at V3.co.uk.

Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser at Sophos Canada, said: “While these numbers do correctly sound large, i would not necessarily jump to the belief that China is being targeted by Japanese and US cyber criminals.

“I am not suggesting that they're lying, but rather that is likely that these attacks are perpetrated by compromised computers which are controlled by worms trying to randomly hook up with other vulnerable systems.

“At SophosLabs we detect greater than 20,000 new infected URLs, let alone receiving greater than 100,000 new malicious code samples day-after-day. Compare this with 1,116 Chinese websites "tampered with by overseas-based hackers" last year.

Wisniewski said observing CERT's most modern weekly report, approximately 90 per cent of infections in China were from the Conficker worm, which was first discovered in November 2008.