A wave of attacks in the UK, Germany, and the United States from Chinese-based computers had the Chinese foreign ministry issuing an official denial that their government had been involved. Afterwards, officials from New Zealand reported that Chinese spies had been behind a recent spate of attacks on their computer systems, although no confidential information had been compromised. France later also experienced attacks on their systems, although they could not say with certainty that the Chinese government was directly involved. Finally, Chinese government computers also came under attack: Lou Qinjian, China's Vice Minister of Information Industry, said that the attacks caused "
massive damage" and that his country's Internet infrastructure was "
riddled with security holes that had made a mockery of the ruling Communist Party's censorship and exposed many secrets to spies."
Giacomo Paoni, the chief technical officer of the security firm WSLabi, believes that Chinese ISPs may have been partially responsible for making these sorts of attacks so prevalent. "
Internet Service Providers offering Bulletproof hosting-aka bulk-friendly hosting-have a high degree of tolerance as to what actions their customers can carry out," he said, "
therefore they are usually used by attackers and spammers from all over the world as a good way to hide their tracks." Chinese military hackers have already drawn up wargame plans for attacks intended to disable US military assets such as carrier task forces in the event of a real war, so the idea of government-sponsored attacks is not out of the question.
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