Song Zheng, the staff member in charge of cybersecurity at the APEC media center in Beijing, said on Tuesday that a total of 68,814 cyberattacks during the Nov. 7-12 summit were blocked by China, according to the Global Times.
"No organizations or individuals were able to hack into our security system. There was no security incident," Song said.
Director Lu Wei of the State Internet Information Office, during a media conference in October, told reporters that China is a victim of cyberattacks and that "80 percent of its government websites" have already been subjected to such kinds of attacks.
In related news, cyberattacks on Japanese government computers also increased 10-fold in early November just prior to APEC, according to sources cited by The Asahi Shimbun.
"There must have been an organization seeking sensitive inside diplomatic information in preparation for the APEC forum," an information security expert said.
The cyberattacks on Japanese government computers are what are collectively known as targeted email attacks. The emails carry attachment files programmed to exploit certain flaws in the word processing application.
Once opened, the attachment file begins transmitting information stored in the computer without the user's permission. Since victims only see an empty document after opening the file, most remain unaware that they have been subjected to a cyberattack.
In the case of the cyberattacks on the Chinese government websites, however, neither Song Zheng nor Lu Wei said anything about the type of attack nor the suspected source of the hacking.
Back in January of this year, China witnessed the largest-ever incidence of Internet outages in the country. Hundreds of millions of people trying to access many of the country's popular websites were instead redirected to a site which linked to Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a company which offers Freegate, a Web-censorship-circumvention freeware tool.
Incidentally, DIT also has connections with the Falun Gong movement, a spiritual group that is currently banned in China. DIT denied any involvement in the Internet outages and suggested that it may have been caused by glitches in the government's own "Great Firewall," China's online-censorship program.