Hacking Rising On China Cyber Space

Chinese hackers are set to grow in numbers, says Symantec in a new report. The company points out that the number of online workers has grown steeply with people engaging in criminal hacking and government website intrusion.

After the U.S., China is the country with the most malicious activity on the Net, Symantec said based on its data analysis. By the end of 2006, China had 131 million Internet users that were 10 percent of the country's total population and 11 percent of global Internet users.

Co-founder of ANI Exploit, Roger Thompson said that active cyber criminal gangs have been rapidly increasing in China. These gangs look for opportunities to make money from exploit. Tech.blorge published this in news, end week of April 2007.

Thompson further added that Chinese exploit code was technically as sophisticated as the code being developed in the U.S. and Russia. Moreover, a global shift is going on in the area of Internet scams with lot of suspicious activity in China.

Chinese computer experts have also been working on the "pump and dump" scheme, a malicious technique that artificially raises stock prices yielding illegal profits for the scammers, Symantec said in a statement. Tech World published it on May 18, 2007. In October 2004, a group of Chinese experimenters employed a Trojan horse to steal user account details of a number of online stock merchants. Then it used them to run-up some stocks. The victims suffered a loss of U.S. $1.3 million while the scammers profited nearly $114,000.

In one incident also in 2004, an organized attack with the help of Trojan horse programs victimized South Korean online users. Appearing harmless, the trojans actually function maliciously by stealing classified documents.

Sophos has identified around 5,000 new websites with malware infection each day, the company said. And China leads in hosting URLs containing malicious code that accounts for 41 percent of total Web attacks.

However, in the past few years, some of the con artists have set up their own computer security companies. There are now six anti-virus vendors in China apart from many research and consulting bodies on computer security.

Related article: Hacking Attacks Are Increasing to Haunt Banks

» SPAMfighter News - 5/28/2007