Study points to Chinese city as ‘world capital’ of cyberespionage

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
A major traffic analysis of cyberespionage attacks has identified a provincial urban center in southeast China as ‘the world capital’ of cyberespionage. The survey, conducted by cybersecurity firm Symantec, studied the origination points and targets of 12 billion malicious emails. It concluded that nearly one third of all email-based cyberespionage attacks originate from the People’s Republic of China –a percentage far larger than previously thought. It also traced most Chinese cyberespionage attacks to Shaoxing, a city of over four million residents in China’s southeaster Zhejiang province. The Symantec study said that large-scale Chinese cyberespionage attacks appear to be systematic and concentrate on carefully selected targets, such as defense policy experts and human rights activists. In January, most cybersecurity experts identified the Chinese government as the most likely source of a massive cyber-attack on Google and Adobe, which aimed to compromise the companies’ source codes, in an attempt to spy on their users. The Symantec study also points to Romania as a major source of malicious emails (21.1 per cent), followed by the United States, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. The main difference between China and these countries is that cyber-attacks originating from the latter were mostly geared toward commercial fraud.