A Chinese computer security report has stated that China suffered nearly five lakh cyber attacks in 2010 and close to half of it originated from overseas, particularly the US and India. The report said that most of the attacks came in the form of malicious “Trojan” software used by hackers to gain access to target computers.

The National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Cenre of China, the country’s primary computer security monitoring network, said 14.7 per cent of the malicious programmes came from Internet Protocol addresses (IPs) located in the United States, with another eight per cent located in India.

The report said substantial hacking of web pages was either politically or religiously motivated, though most of the times it was purely to show off. Some government agencies’ websites are often targeted by IPs that originate from Turkey, part of political and religious campaigns.