Chinese National Day weekend holiday has been used by malicious hackers to infect more than 1 million computers says Jiangmin Co, a leading Chinese anti-virus company.
Oct. 6 was the scene of more than 118,000 crashed computers as detected by the company’s monitoring systems. "Viruses have been extremely active during the long vacation because more people chose to stay at home and surf the Internet, shopping online or playing online games," He Gongdao, an anti-virus expert at Jiangmin, said on Monday.
"More than 24,000 types of viruses were detected during the week," he said.He said computer users should be more aware of viruses that could be passed on through movable disks.
Another anti-virus company, Kingsoft, alerted the online community to a new virus it dubbed the "ultimate killer to anti-virus software."The virus, a kind of Trojan, is capable of hijacking all kinds of anti-virus software when it successfully attacks a computer.
"It will also automatically search the keywords, including 'anti-virus, Kingsoft and Kaspersky,' and coercively close the programs, Li Tiejun, an anti-virus software engineer of Kingsoft, said.
“The virus has been supported and spread by a group of people who have developed a systematic and standardized business operation to make profit," Li said. Virus controllers could detect the IP addresses of each computer, he added.
The new virus, which affected about 40,000 computers a day, will remain a critical threat to many computer users even after the holiday, Li said.
According to the latest survey conducted by the Ministry of Public Security, China has encountered a rising Internet security problem over the past three years, mainly triggered by a growing number of profit-driven computer virus writers, hackers and illegal traders.
Some 65.7 percent of 15,000 companies polled had suffered Internet security problems from May last year to May this year, 11.7 percentage points higher than before.
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