China claims its military and defense sites were hacked by U.S. attackers
In a move to counter recent reports claiming that a special unit in the Chinese Army is behind repeated cyber attacks on U.S. institutions, the nation Thursday claimed its military and defense ministries websites are routinely hacked from IP addresses originating within the United States.
More than 144,000 hacking attempts per month are targeted at the China Military Online and Defense Ministry websites, Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng said at a news conference, Reuters reports. Close to two-thirds of those attacks (62.9 percent) originated in the United States, Yansheng said.
The problem with numbers like that is they include almost any network activity as an attack, says Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst with IT-Harvest, a cyber defense industry research firm in Birmingham, Mich. "Everybody in the industry knows those numbers include port scans and probes, which don't make an attack," he said in an interview.
