China blames India for e-attacks

China claimed on Tuesday that 8% of cyber attacks targeted at its computers last year originated from India. Reshma Patil reports.

China claimed on Tuesday that 8% of cyber attacks targeted at its computers last year originated from India.

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The accusation came days after security company McAfee exposed a five-year global cyber spying campaign run by an unnamed ‘state actor’ to penetrate 72 organisations including the governments of India, the US, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam, the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee. Security experts said the main suspect was China.

“China suffered about 493,000 cyber attacks last year, about half of which originated from abroad, particularly the United States and India,” said Xinhua on Tuesday, citing an official computer security report.

The National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Centre of China said in its report that about 15 per cent of these malicious programmes came from Internet Protocol or IP addresses located in the US, and another eight per cent located in India.

It said that a majority of these nearly five lakh hits on Chinese computers last year were in the form of malicious Trojan software masked in the form of a computer application.

Over the last two years Beijing has denied a slew of accusations that hackers inside China were aiming attacks on foreign computers and Gmail accounts.

The state media recently hit back, calling the accusations based on the McAfee report ‘irresponsible’. The brief statement released in Xinhua, China's official news agency, is seen as a counter to these allegations.