Expert confirms mobile Internet poses new cyber threat

A report released on Thursday showed that Chinese websites and computers were hit by numerous overseas attacks last year.

The China Internet Development Report 2014 jointly issued by the Internet Society of China and the China Internet Network Information Center said that "backdoors" created overseas hacked about 61,000 websites on the Chinese mainland last year, up 62.1 percent from 2012.

A backdoor is a method of bypassing normal authentication and securing illegal remote access to a computer.

Over 10.9 million computers on the mainland were controlled by overseas servers. The US was home to 30.2 percent of these servers. Hong Kong and South Korea are the other two major regions that house these servers.

A previous report released by cloud service provider Akamai claimed that 43 percent of observed cyber attack traffic originated from the Chinese mainland during the fourth quarter of 2013. However Akamai said it does not necessarily mean that the attacks were launched by Chinese hackers as any criminal overseas could launch attacks from compromised systems in China.

"Aside from attacks from outside of the country, domestic Internet security has become an increasingly more worrisome issue," said Shi Xiansheng, deputy secretary of the Internet Society of China.

According to Shi, domestic phishing attacks targeting Chinese banks have seen a rise of 35.4 percent and the number of IP addresses involved in such attacks has increased by 64.6 percent from 2012.

Malware and viruses on the mobile Internet pose another threat to cyber security, the report warned.

The number of newly added malware on the mobile Internet in 2013 reached 703,000, 3.3 times more than that of 2012. Mobile phone app stores, forums, download sites and downstream users were affected at a faster pace than before, said the report.

"Due to the lack of a proper management mechanism and security inspection, malware has inundated the mobile Internet. With the rapid development of China's mobile Internet, the security of the mobile Internet has actually deteriorated, especially on the Android platform, where malware is increasing exponentially," said Zhou Zhen, a senior analyst with the China Internet Network Information Center.

Zhou and other experts suggest that China should establish a comprehensive Internet security defense system from the national level and complete relevant laws to counter cyber security threats in the future.

Since formally joining the Internet age in April 1994, Chinese Internet users had grown to 618 million by the end of 2013, the largest number in the world.