White-hat Hackers - China Not the Biggest Source of Cyber Attacks

Zhao Wei, a White-hat Hacker and Chief Executive Officer of KnownSec Inc. a security company in China, while attending the CanSecWest Security Conference held at Vancouver, Canada, said that the security industry in China was highly concerned about the security weaknesses within its computer networks. According to him, this preoccupation of the Chinese security industry was far more than waging cyber attacks against the US as well as other western nations like the UK and Germany, as reported by SecurityFocus on March 20, 2009.

The security specialists state that for many years, countries have been regarding China as an initiator of cyber attacks. For instance, the US legislators in June 2008 alleged that hackers using Chinese servers had stolen information from the syste,, and in the same summer, hackers utilizing similar Internet Protocol addresses captured details from Barack Obama's and John McCain's presidential campaigns. But Zhao's assertions confront all such forms of accusations.

Zhao explained that any nation planning to attack its opponents could launch the attack from China without revealing its real origin. To support his comment, Zhao referred to the Internet attacks that KnownSec traced to China, emphasizing that those attacks had moved to other countries' servers before terminating in China.

Zhao said the other nations are aware that China has poor IT security; thus, they carry out their attacks through Chinese servers. Consequently, China is misunderstood as the largest malware generator, as reported by SecurityFocus on March 20, 2009.

Besides, Zhao remarked that if hackers in China think of launching attacks against the US networks, it will not be wise to carry out from their own country.

To back these claims, other security specialists argued that China itself is experiencing the problems of cyber security. It is evident from security provider SecureWorks' announcement during the autumn of 2008 that China was one of the countries whose computers were the greatest victims of botnet compromises.

Thus, Zhao concluded that while China could be a nation from where computer hackers run their activities, it isn't the single most and largest originator of such activities.

Related article: What To Do If A Virus Attacks Your PC?

» SPAMfighter News - 3/31/2009