Numerous online attacks against China have been traced back to U.S. servers. But unlike authorities in the United States, the Chinese government chooses to not point the finger, according to the head of the country’s computer emergency response team.
“We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it’s not helpful in solving the problem,” Huang Chengqing, the director of the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (CNCERT), told government-run media outlet China Daily Wednesday.
According to data published by CNCERT, in the first three months of 2013, 5.6 million systems in China were infected by malware tied to 13,400 command-and-control servers located overseas. Of those, more than half of infected systems — 2.9 million PCs — were controlled by about 4,000 command-and-control servers based in the United States. Meanwhile, 3,500 U.S. systems had been used to take over about 7,700 different websites located in China.
In the same timeframe, CNCERT reported that 54 U.S.-based IP addresses had “hijacked Chinese official websites to steal data,” which according to China Daily included sites related to “government departments, key information systems and research institutions.”