42 million malicious programs detected targeting China in 2020, mostly from US and India: report

Cyber theft Photo: Xinhua

China has captured more than 42 million malicious program samples in 2020, with an average daily spread of more than 4.82 million times. The overseas sources of these malicious program samples were mainly the US and India, according to the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC) on Wednesday.

This report comes as the US and its allies ramp up efforts to turn cyberspace into a new battlefield by groundlessly accusing China of conducting cyberattacks worldwide. Such groundless accusations will not change the fact that the US remains the world’s top spying empire with widespread malfeasance in cyberspace, observers said. 

About 55.41 million IP addresses in China were attacked by malicious programs, accounting for 14.2 percent of the total number of IP addresses in the country. These attacked IP addresses are mainly based in East China’s Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and South China’s Guangdong, the report said. 

Over the years China has been a major victim of cyberattacks. According to the annual report by CNCERT/CC, in 2020 about 5.31 million hosts on the Chinese mainland were controlled by a total of about 52,000 overseas malicious program command and control servers. The top three origins of these overseas servers in terms of the number of compromised Chinese hosts are all from NATO member states, according to a statement from the Chinese Mission to the European Union (EU) in response to the accusations.

The Global Times learned from Chinese tech giant 360 Security Technology last year of a series of attacks against China’s aerospace, scientific research institutions, petroleum industry and large-scale internet companies by a hacking organization affiliated with the CIA. The company found proof that the hacking group, APT-C-39, belongs to the CIA, and the hack was traced back to 2008, mainly targeting organizations in Beijing, South China’s Guangdong and East China’s Zhejiang provinces. 

Global Times