Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cyberwarfare

Taiwan Government Faces 5 Million Cyberattacks Daily: Official

Taiwan’s government agencies face around five million cyberattacks and probes a day, an official said Wednesday, as a report warned of increasing Chinese cyber warfare targeting the self-ruled island.

Taiwan’s government agencies face around five million cyberattacks and probes a day, an official said Wednesday, as a report warned of increasing Chinese cyber warfare targeting the self-ruled island.

Taiwanese officials have previously said the island faces millions of cyberattacks every month, with around half of them believed to originate from China.

Speaking in parliament, cyber security department director Chien Hung-wei said Taiwan’s government network faces “five million attacks and scans a day”. 

A scan in cyber security refers to an attempt to locate weaknesses in a server.

[ ReadAcer Confirms Breach of Servers in Taiwan ]

“We are strengthening the government’s defensive measures and collecting relevant data for analysis in a bid to stop the attacks when they are initiated,” Chien told lawmakers.

Taipei has accused Beijing of ramping up cyber attacks since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, who views the island as a sovereign nation.

Beijing views democratic Taiwan as part of its own territory and has vowed to one day seize the island, by force if necessary.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

In a report released on Tuesday, Taiwan’s defence ministry warned that China has been “vigorously enhancing” its cyber warfare capabilities as part of the strategy to bring the island to heel.

The ministry’s information security and protection centre detected and handled around 1.4 billion “anomalies” from 2019 to August 2021 to prevent potential hacking, according to the report.

In July, Taiwan’s police launched an investigation after the Line messaging app reported abnormal account activities to the authorities. 

Local media said the hacked accounts belonged to “high ranking officials” in various government branches.

Last year, Taiwanese authorities said Chinese hackers infiltrated at least 10 Taiwan government agencies and gained access to around 6,000 email accounts in an attempt to steal data. 

RelatedThousands of Taiwan Government Email Accounts ‘Hacked by China’

Written By

AFP 2023

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cyberwarfare

WASHINGTON - Cyberattacks are the most serious threat facing the United States, even more so than terrorism, according to American defense experts. Almost half...

Cyberwarfare

Russian espionage group Nomadic Octopus infiltrated a Tajikistani telecoms provider to spy on 18 entities, including government officials and public service infrastructures.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Data Breaches

LastPass DevOp engineer's home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud...

Cyberwarfare

Several hacker groups have joined in on the Israel-Hamas war that started over the weekend after the militant group launched a major attack.

Incident Response

Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of Security Copilot, a ChatGPT-powered tool to help organizations automate cybersecurity tasks.