Don't blame us for international hacking, the Chinese government said Tuesday — we're victims too.
China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT) issued figures from an upcoming annual report on Aug. 9 claiming that the country was the target of nearly 480,000 Trojan horse attacks in 2010, PCWorld.com reported.
According to the report, 221,000 attacks originated outside of China; 14.7 percent of those attacks (32,487) originated from IP addresses in the United States; another 8.8 percent (19,448) came from India.
The CNCERT report also found that 35,000 websites in China were hacked in 2010; more than 4,600 were government sites.
Chinese computers also fell victim to botnets; the CNCERT detected nearly 14,000 IP addresses in China corrupted by botnet viruses in 2010. The U.S., India and Turkey were the top three countries behind these mass automated networks of infected computers, according to TG Daily.
These statistics are surprising given China's checkered cybercrime history.
For the past few years, Chinese online criminals widely believed to be working for or with the Chinese government have launched devastating attacks on several prominent targets, including the French and British treasuries, the European Union, Google, major U.S. defense contractors and dozens of Fortune 500 companies.