A total of 29 hacker groups, including Darkhotel and OceanLotus, carried out advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks against Chinese institutions in 2015, according to a recently released report.
China's research, education and government institutions were the primary targets of APT attacks in 2015, according to a report released by Chinese Internet security and software company Qihoo 360's SkyEye Labs.
Attackers have managed to steal a large amount of sensitive data from Chinese research organizations and government institutes, posing serious hazards to national security, the report warned.
It noted that companies and institutions in many fields, including energy and military services, also fell victim to cyber attacks last year.
APT attacks, which apply advanced hacking techniques in a continuous fashion, are usually launched by hacker groups in squads with "extensive and systematic equipment," Qin An, a cyber security expert at the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Referring to Sunday's alleged Islamic State hack of the website of Tsinghua University, a prestigious university in China, Qin said, "Instead of focusing on visible threats like the hacking of a website, more attention should be paid to invisible Internet threats like APT, which pose more risks to a country's key information systems and infrastructure."
Over the past 12 months, those attacks affected at least 10,000 computers across all of the Chinese mainland's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions.
Beijing and Southeast China's Guangdong Province topped a list of provinces and cities that suffered from attacks. Other hard-hit areas were coastal provinces such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Fujian, people.cn reported.
Despite the fact that many APT attacks targeting China were low-budget endeavors, most of them were not prevented or stopped due to weak Internet security defenses, according to the report.
