Cooperative attitude needed for cyberspace security

BEIJING - Tackling cyber attacks needs all countries to have a cooperative attitude instead of nations making groundless accusations, Chinese experts said.

According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Monday, some countries are treating cyberspace as a new battlefield, justifying their efforts to build up their own cyber arsenals by making their own rules on how it should be treated.

Her comment was made in response to a question regarding an alleged Chinese cyber attack directed at German organizations and businesses.

The accusation came after allegations from the United States of Chinese hacking activities.

Instead of unfounded finger-pointing, relevant countries and governments should consider more measures to promote international cooperation to maintain cyberspace security, Chinese Internet expert Fang Xingdong, who founded bokee.com, said.

Yang Hongxi, a research fellow of the China Center for Contemporary World Studies, agrees. He said cooperation is a more effective way in curbing transnational cyber crimes and attacks.

However, such cooperation should only be based on the premise of mutual respect and refraining from malicious distortion of facts and intentional smearing other countries' images, Yang said.

Experts noted that China itself suffers from Internet hacking rather than being a major source of such attacks.

A report released this month by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center (CNCERT), a Chinese Internet security center, showed that a total of 73,286 overseas IPs were involved in hijacking nearly 14.2 million mainframes in China via Trojan or Botnet last year.

The country's Internet also suffers other problems, including the spreading of malicious codes and attacks on websites from overseas.

It is natural that there are some individual hackers in China, but so far there is no evidence that such attackers are supported by the government, Fang said.

On the contrary, the government has been taking vigorous efforts to crack down on online crimes and hacking attacks, he said.

Yang criticized the claims of government-backed cyber attacks from China as a new argument of the "China threat" rhetoric that aims to contain the country.

The "China threat" hype is also an instrument for the United States to make an online alliance with relevant countries to increase its own control over the Internet, said Ma Gang, professor and a national security expert with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) National Defense University.

Ma said that such intention is a display of a Cold War mentality stretching from conventional battlefields to cyberspace.

Fang said, "In fact, in terms of history and level of 'expertise' of hacker attacks, the United States and Germany are far more developed than China."

According to the CNCERT report, the United States appeared to be the largest source of overseas hackers targeting China's Internet.

A total of 17.6 percent of the controlling terminals of Trojan and Botnet attacks from abroad are located in the United States and out of the 14.2 million victim mainframe IPs in China, 10.5 million, or 74 percent, were under control by servers in the United States, the report said.

Hacker IPs from Germany also controlled 778,000 mainframe IPs in China, according to the report.

Also, hacker IPs from the United States were found to be responsible for 22.9 percent of the attacks directed at China's websites, it said.

It is very likely that the United States is using the "Chinese hacker" argument as a tool to distract the public's attention from its own liability for cyberspace security problems, Fang added.