Computer Crimes on Surge in China

According to "The Internet in China," a new white paper that the Chinese State Council's Information Office released on June 7, 2010, there has been an increasing number of online crimes across the nation during the past few years.

States the paper, crimes like creating as well as disseminating PC viruses along with hacking of computers have been rising. Other offenses like spreading gambling, pornography and obscenity continue to be serious problems, according to the paper. English.cri.cn reported this on June 8, 2010.

Moreover, in 2009, there were over 1 Million Internet Protocol addresses in China whose controllers operated from abroad. Also, hackers defaced 42,000 websites, and the Conficker worm infected 18 Million computers in the country each month, which is around 30% of the systems infected worldwide.

Indeed, the statistics in the paper receive a strong support from the CNCERT (China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team) report issued in May 2010. That report said that in China, the B variant of Conficker had infected approximately 7 Million IP addresses by the end of 2009.

Notably, according to security agency BKIS of Vietnam, the country from where the Conficker worm has emerged is China. Earlier, rumors spread that it might have originated from Europe or Russia. Actually, the agency arrived at this conclusion after analyzing the coding of the virus. According to it, the coding of Conficker is intimately associated with that of Nimda, a notorious worm which created trouble on e-mail and the Internet during 2001.

Besides the details associated with PC virus, the white paper outlines other results too. According to them, online theft and fraud as well as other types of offenses that intrude into people's property also seem to be rising fast.

Moreover, the paper states that public security units tackled 142 PC related crime incidences during 1998, 29,000 during 2007, 35,000 during 2008 and 48,000 during 2009.

Finally, the just released white paper guarantees that Chinese citizens will enjoy the freedom to express their opinion online. For the Government, this is an extremely important thing following the widespread criticism it faced whilst it censored Internet giant Google's divisions earlier in 2010, which prompted the company to abandon the Chinese domain.

Related article: Computer Virus Writers Adopt New Strategy

» SPAMfighter News - 6/15/2010