Digital Journalism Review | China No 1 in netizens - and cyberattacks

China will probably retain its position as the world’s biggest source of cyberattacks for quite a while, giving its enormous number of its netizens.

According to the “State of the Internet” report for the third quarter of 2012, which was released by Akamai on Wednesday, a third of all computer attacks came from China. This respresents a dramatic increase over the previous quarter when only 16 per cent of cyberattacks originated in China.

The figures proved, said some Chinese programmers, that China had become one of the most popular bases for global hackers to find camouflage behind the average Chinese netizens’ lack of online knowledge and more specifically knowledge about how to protect themselves online.

Most hackers use less knowledgeable netizens’ computers as camouflage from which to launch their attacks.

The report did not claim the attacks “were by China”, but crucially “from China’, a Shanghai-based software developer who didn’t not wish to use his name said.

The doubling of the number of attacks from 16 (in the second quarter) to 33 per cent (in the third quarter of last year) was dramatic as the number of Chinese netizen had not grown at a similar proportion over that period of time, the developer said.