Chinese Military Accuses United States of Hacking
After the United States accuses the Chinese Army for attacking websites of US-based institutions, China countered with a claim that its military and defense ministries websites are being hacked from IP addresses originating from the US.
China’s Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng said in a news conference that there are over 144,000 hacking attempts targeting China Military Online and Defense Ministry websites on a monthly basis. Yansheng claimed that about two-thirds (62.9 percent) of those attacks originated in the US.
Online security experts, meanwhile, said the numbers are exaggerated. Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst with Michigan-based cyber defense research firm IT-Harvest, said that the numbers China provided may have included almost any network activity that cannot be considered as a cyber attack.
“Everybody in the industry knows those numbers include port scans and probes, which don’t make an attack,” Stiennon said in an interview. “Any kid in a basement can probe a computer in China. For that matter, Google probes every IP address every day, so you can’t call that an attack.”
Yansheng stopped short of accusing the US government of cyber hacking, only that the attacks came from the United States. However, he noted that his country is concerned with reports that the US is planning to expand its cyber warfare capabilities.
Source: Reuters, via PC World
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