Society

Chinese police arrest hundreds of cyber attack suspects

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-11-30 22:38

BEIJING - Police across China have solved 180 cyber attack cases and arrested more than 460 suspects as of the end of November, figures from the Ministry of Public Security show.

Also, 14 websites had been closed for allegedly providing hacker software, training hackers and organizing attacks, according to a statement released Tuesday by the ministry.

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"Currently, our country's cyber crime situation is still very grave," said an unnamed ministry official, noting frequent hacker attacks, many computer systems without protection software and Internet users' low awareness and capacity for protecting their computers.

Further, the number of cyber attack cases in the country soared by more than 80 percent annually, said the statement.

The ministry noted that the current problems were caused by many criminals using foreign Internet resources during attacks, noting that more than 127,000 foreign IP addresses were controlled by Trojan horse viruses during attacks on targeted computers in China during the first half of 2010.

The ministry vowed to continue the crackdown on hacker crimes, with a focus on botnet attacks.

A botnet is a network of computers that have had malicious software installed on them and are under the control of criminals, while the owners of the computers remain unaware of the computer hacking.