35,000 Chinese Internet Sites Infiltrated During 2010

According to CNCERT/CC (National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/ Coordination Center) of China in its newly released Internet Security Report, during 2010, Web-hackers attacked an aggregate of 35,000 websites that were hosted from China of which 4,635 belonged to the government. People's Daily Online published this in news on March 10, 2011.

Reveals CNCERT/CC, either a computer virus or Trojan horse infected the Internet Protocol addresses which 5m computers in the country registered to.

States the agency, while hackers easily compromise government websites, their primary targets are financial institution websites. Moreover, CNCERT/CC's collected statistics disclose that there was a 21.5% decline in the total count of Internet sites hacked over the period 2009-10.

Specifically, according to the report, albeit during 2010, there weren't any considerable security incidences, the security of government websites proved vulnerable, while financial industries' websites were getting to be hackers' main targets.

Meanwhile, it was increasingly found that network criminals had a tendency to seek profits, with cyber-criminals such as phishers chiefly targeting websites of financial institutions, e-commerce operators and intermediate Internet payment service suppliers.

And though the number of compromised websites declined since 2009, government websites that were hacked rose 67.6% during 2009-10, while 60% of Internet sites of the ministries had concealed danger that enabled hackers to infiltrate. CRIENGLISH.com published this in news on March 10, 2011.

Said head of CNCERT/CC's Operation Department Zhou Yonglin, hackers utilized 2 chief techniques for compromising government websites. First, they converted the sites' homepages into the main pages of hacker groups with the objective of flaunting their skills. Second, they added their own web-pages to the government websites, though hidden, prior to informing probable takers that they were controlling the government sites' bandwidth and servers that could be transferred and leased to criminals, Yonglin explained. People's Daily Online reported this in news on March 10, 2011.

In addition, hackers attacked 3rd-party Internet payment, financial industries and e-Business websites, while mimicking them for tricking Web-surfers into accessing the copycat sites so that their login details of usernames and passwords could be stolen thus leading to financial drains, the report reveals.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 3/19/2011