CHINA’S INTERNET users have poured scorn on recent western media reports that cyber attacks on web giant Google and other firms originated from two Chinese educational institutions.
A New York Timesreport linked the attacks, which were among the reasons given why Google said it was considering quitting China, to two educational institutions, the prestigious Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang vocational school. Some of the internet commentators thought the report was an early April Fools' joke.
Jiaotong University is one of China’s “Ivy League” schools, attracting the best graduates and has a special school for information security engineering.
The status of the other school, Lanxiang, is more complicated. The vocational school trains hairdressers and chefs and insists its expertise is in vehicle maintenance/repair. It advertises for students on TV. One online wit said the cookery school was actually in the business of manufacturing chemical weapons, while the automobile repair department was actually manufacturing robots and heavy war machines. The welding shop was actually engaged in the design of laser-based and high-energy particle weapons. At the same time, Lanxiang says it has the biggest computer laboratory in the world, a boast it says is confirmed by Guinness World Records.
The row has caused a strain between Beijing, which insists it opposes hacking, and Washington, which is trying to pressure Beijing to do more to stop hacking. In January Google threatened to pull back from China and shut its Google.cn Chinese-language portal over complaints of censorship and sophisticated hacking.
However, many in the western media were sticking to their guns. The Financial Times reported that US government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware programme used in hacker attacks on Google.
The newspaper reported that a security consultant had posted sections of the programme to a hacking forum where he described it as something he was "working on". It also cited unnamed sources backing the New York Timesreport that analysts had traced the attacks to Jiaotong and Lanxiang.
Meanwhile, a senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army has urged a new national body to enforce internet controls. Maj Gen Huang Yongyin said China needed to keep pace with the efforts of other big powers to fight online infiltration and attacks.
“For national security, the internet has already become a new battlefield without gunpowder,” Maj Gen Huang wrote in a prominent magazine published by the Communist Party’s influential Central Party School.
Tens of thousands of security officials work at monitoring the internet in China, the famous “Great Firewall of China”, and more than a dozen ministries and agencies are involved in enforcing the rules, which critics believe are used to stop dissent.