Accusation of Chinese government's participation in cyber attack "groundless": ministry

BEIJING, Jan. 25 (Xinhua) -- China restated on Sunday its resolute opposition to claims that the government was involved in cyber attack and vowed to enhance cooperation with international community to fight against Internet crimes.

"Accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China. We firmly opposed to that," spokesman of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told Xinhua in an exclusive interview on Sunday.

"China's policy on Internet safety is transparent and consistent," he said.

Internet security was a global concern which required international coordinated efforts. China was willing to deepen cooperation with other countries and learn from their experiences to make Internet a better place, he said.

The spokesman's remarks came nearly two weeks after search engine giant Google said it might quit China citing disagreements with government policies and unidentified attacks targeting Google's services in China.

"China is the biggest victim country of hacking as its Internet has long been facing severe threats of hacker and online virus attacks," the spokesman said.

Official data showed more than one million IP addresses were under control by overseas sources and the number of Web sites tampered by hackers exceeded 42,000 last year.

The widespread Conficker worm virus infected 18 million computers per month in 2009, the most in the world, or 30 percent of the global total infected.

According to the Internet Society of China, the number of cyber attacks from abroad saw a year-on-year increase of 148 percent in 2008.

They not only affected a large number of netizens but also sectors of finance, transportation and energy, which posed severe harm to economic development and people's lives, the spokesman said.

He noted the Chinese government had issued various regulations and launched many Internet safety campaigns against the attacks.

The National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team dealt with more than 1,000 Web accidents in 2009 and helped recover economic losses for many banks and E-business Web sites.

China has also taken part in the Internet safety emergency drill organized by the ASEAN countries for many times, and signed cooperation pacts with member countries of regional organizations in Asia.