New rules to curb cyber attacks

Gu Jian, deputy director of the internet security bureau of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), said China will issue new judicial rules governing sentences for cyber attack crimes by the end of this year.
He said China has become a major target of online crimes such as hacker attacks, with eight out of every 10 computers in the country having suffered botnet attacks.
Botnet is a network of computers that have had malicious software installed while the owners of the computers remain unaware of the computer hacking.
China criminalized attacks on computer systems in 1997, and made specific provisions on hacker attacks in its seventh amendment to the Criminal Law in 2009.
CRIEnglish.com reported Gu as saying that in most botnet cases in China, the controllers were found to be located abroad. He added that more than 80% of the cyber attacks targeting websites of China’s government agencies came from overseas.