Hack attacks mainly come from US IPs: CNCERT

A week after The New York Times accused Chinese hackers of using sophisticated techniques to gain access to its website and employee email accounts, China's top Internet coordination center reported that China has been victimized by cyber crimes that originated from the US, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Thursday.

The National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (CNCERT) found that in 2012, some 14.197 million mainframe computers in China had been attacked by Trojans or proxy zombie networks from foreign IPs.

Some 105.12 million mainframe computers were attacked by Trojans from US-based IP address in 2012, the No. 1 cyber-aggressive country on CNCERT's cyber crime list. Attacks from South Korea and the Germany were second and third, CNCERT reported.

The center also found that 65.5 percent of the websites that host malicious software were against outside of China, said CNCERT.

"Based-on the report, we cannot absolutely conclude that US was the country that attacked us the most, though it shows most attacks were done by the hackers using US-based IPs," Fang Binxing, who helped create the security system dubbed the "Great Firewall of China," told the Global Times Thursday.

Fang said identifying hackers was very difficult as they change IPs after they attack.

"The US has criticized China for being involved in hacking for sometime but it's not fair as they don't have solid evidence," Fang told the Global Times.

The New York Times hired an Internet security firm that tracked hackers for several months, which it said originated from the mainland.