West justifying cyber arsenals

A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Monday that some countries have treated cyberspace as a new battlefield, justifying their efforts to build up their own cyber arsenals.

Spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the remarks at a regular press briefing in response to a question regarding an alleged Chinese cyber attack directed at Germany.

Hua said the accusations increase the risk of conflict, which China is working to prevent.

"China has cooperated in the areas of cyber security and law enforcement with 30 countries. It has developed an overall mechanism for fighting cyber crime," Hua, was quoted by the Xinhua News Agency as saying, adding that China will continue to work to safeguard cyberspace security.

Hua's comments came after a report Sunday in the German magazine Der Spiegel saying that the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) and German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp recorded major attacks by Chinese hackers in 2012.

The magazine said companies throughout Germany are increasingly attacked by Chinese hackers. A spokesman for EADS told Reuters the attacks were "standard attacks" and the company was working closely with government authorities on the issue of cyber security.

ThyssenKrupp confirmed an attack occurred in the US from a Chinese Internet address and said that it had no information on what data the attackers obtained, according to Der Spiegel, Reuters reported.

About 1,100 digital attacks were from foreign intelligence agencies, German government records showed. Most of them are in the form of e-mails containing Trojan attachments targeting the chancellery, the foreign and economics ministries, thelocal.de, a Sweden-based website, reported Sunday.

China is regarded by German companies as the main source of electronic attacks by unknown parties, Deutsche Welle reported early this month, citing a survey of 500 industry leaders on e-crime conducted by the consultancy KPMG. Russia and eastern European countries were the next biggest threats, said Deutsche Welle.

The New York Times in late January also accused Chinese hackers of attacking its website.

In response, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Thursday that the Ministry of National Defense had made it clear China was not involved in the cyber attacks in the US. Hong said the accusations were groundless and unprofessional, according to Xinhua.

"It's a clichéthat foreign countries defame China with such excuses. They usually can't show any meaningful evidence," Fang Binxing, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told the Global Times.

"If they really want to solve the problems, they should ask Chinese police to investigate the cases by providing useful evidence. What they are doing is purposely creating an online war of words," Fang said, noting that the foreign media seldom mentions the fact that foreigner hackers have attacked websites in China.

Statistics from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (CNCERT) show that 73,286 overseas IPs were involved in hijacking nearly 14.2 million mainframes in China last year, Xinhua reported. Of the victim mainframes, 10.5 million, or 74 percent, were controlled by servers in the US.