China

Nearly half the cyber-attacks hitting Chinese systems, whether they are botnets, Trojans or Web attacks, originate abroad, and the United States is the source for the largest share, Chinese officials said.

A Taiwanese political party suspects the Chinese government is behind a hacking attack that stole information about the party's election activities.

Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said on Tuesday that some of the attacks had been traced to China's Xinhua News Agency, a state-run press group. The attack operated as a phishing campaign, in which hackers impersonating other party employees sent DPP staffers email messages that asked the recipients to open attached files, which secretly contained viruses to monitor the computers, a DPP spokesperson said.

The breach of RSA, the security division of EMC, last spring in which sensitive information related to RSA SecurID tokens was stolen, can be traced back to an attack originating in China, a security researcher strongly believes based on a close look into malware associated with the RSA breach.

China's largest search engine, Baidu, has begun offering downloads of its new Internet browser, which boasts its own collection of 30,000" apps" that can quickly connect users to online games, videos and other tools.

A beta version of Baidu Browser was released on Monday. The browser is advertised as "simple and reliable", offering secure navigation of the Web to protect from malware. But the browser also has a "treasure house" feature, which functions like an app store.

I stopped following the spam problem in detail a while ago, but assumed that China was a major source of the stuff. It just sort of seems like it would be, but it turns out this is no longer the case.

In most countries it's cheap and easy to register a domain name. Not in China where the government makes you run things past them. A side-effect was to kill off spamming from Chinese domains. It all began with a directive from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), which administers the .CN domain:

A Chinese city of more than 12 million, one of the nation's most populous, is deploying 500,000 CCTV cameras to crack-down on crime.

The Peaceful Chongqing project will see cameras deployed across half a million neighbourhoods and parks over some 600 square kilometres in Chongqing, according to the Wall Street Journal.

After setting up its own cyber-warfare team, China's military has now developed its first online war game aimed at improving combat skills and battle awareness, state press said Wednesday.

"Glorious Mission" is a first-person shooter game that sends players on solo or team missions armed with high-tech weapons, the China Daily reported.

Weapons used in the game are part of the actual arsenal of China's People's Liberation Army, it added. The final version of the game, which took nearly three years to develop and test, was launched on June 20.