Nations blame China for recent cyber hackings

The Belgian government speculates that China may be interested in spying on them because NATO and the European Union have headquarters in the country as well as in exploring Belgium's historical connections with Central Africa.

Meanwhile, infiltration into protected information is a critically sensitive matter for India since the information that the Chinese hackers were trying to procure would give China an advantage in any potential conflict.

Security experts fear that apart from giving China a good idea of the content, the hacking also enables them to disable the networks during a conflict. Further the information could be used for battlefield purposes and into designing new weapons and equipment.

With reports published in a national daily, several big attacks have been sourced to China over the last few months including prominent ones on National Informatics Centre (NIC) aimed at the National Security Council (NSC), and on the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

Senior MEA officials have revealed that that the computers at the Indian Embassy in Beijing had been targeted in April by hackers. The Government also admits that its websites and portals are under sustained attack from Chinese cyber crawlers but said classified information has not been compromised. Consolatory fact is that the computers storing sensitive data are standalone systems not linked to the Internet.

CERT-IN, the official watchdog that tracks hacking of government networks, has refused to comment on the matter. But they do presume that these attacks are not isolated incidents of hacking but a more sophisticated and methodical one.

"No website is 100 percent safe. There are websites with high level of security but there is always some weakness," said China's cyber 'ethical' hacker Xiao Chen.