Behind the hype of 'Chinese hacker threat'

The New York Times claimed to have been attacked by Chinese hackers on January 30. Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of Wall Street Journal also alleged that fact one day later.

And on February 2, Washington Post also alleged the first cyber attack of 2011 may have been made by Chinese hackers.

However, is that true? The famous American computer security software McAfee's director of global communications Joris Evers once said, China's zombies (a type of computers infected with viruses controlled by malicious hackers) account for twelve percent among this kind of computers in the whole world. United States Symantec also has issued a report saying: the United States is hackers' base camp, and China is the biggest victim.

According to the data released by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China, in the first half of last year, about 7.8 million domestic computers suffered the attacks from 27.900 different IP address from other countries, but mainly from the United States.

Actually, it is very complicated to determine the source of hacker attacks, so it's arbitrary and irresponsible for the US to blame China's network for the attacks with no real evidence.

China has always been considered as a big rival of the United States in the digital era. Network intrusion behavior can be made by others, or even by someone in the inner circle, so we should not rule out the possibility of cyber attacks directed by the US itself.

In recent years, "China threat theory" was split into different sub-projects by the west as "military threat", "energy threat", "environment threat", "spy threat" or simply "hacker threat". This may connect with some western people's worries about their profits influenced by China's economic and technological strength.

However, it is a fact that, while rendering the "China's Internet threats", the United States is also rapidly expanding its network security forces and media following recent news that the United States was going to expand its network security force by five.

As an internet power with high network technology, can the United States look at their own system, and participate in global exchanges and cooperation in the field of network security in a constructive manner, rather than continue hyping "Chinese hacker threat"?