The number of government websites that have been hacked during January 4 to 10 reached 178, 409% higher than the previous week, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said Monday.

The ministry rated recent Internet security level as low based on figures released by National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical team, The Beijing News reports.

As to the attackers, Lv Jingjian from China Computer Federation said they might be organized terrorists, individual legpullers, or civil network teams who want to arouse attention from the governments through such vicious attacks.

Currently most official websites are vulnerable to hackers, especially those county-level networks, which lack professional maintenance teams, Lv said, proposing to set up a national network security system.

(CRIENGLISH.com January 19, 2010)