The National Center for High-performance Computing detected nearly 150 million cyberattacks per month across Taiwan’s academic networks last quarter, but a cloud platform that started operating last month should boost its cyberdefense capability, the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL) said yesterday.
The center has deployed a security system of more than 6,000 honeypots for detecting cyberattacks around the clock, the NARL said.
It helps monitor the Internet systems used by 4,000 schools and academic institutions across the nation, including Academia Sinica, and produces monthly and quarterly reports for the Ministry of Science and Technology, center deputy director-general Lin Hsi-ching (林錫慶) said.
Photo: Chien Hui-ju, Taipei Times
In the third quarter, the center detected nearly 150 million cyberattacks and 300,000 malware-infected applications across the academic systems per month, he said.
The top 10 sources of these attacks were: the US, Russia, China, the Seychelles, France, Vietnam, the UK, South Korea, Australia and India, he said.
The ranking of source countries might differ slightly every month, while Taiwanese systems are likely being used as gateways for other destinations, Lin said.
The center’s capability to analyze the routes and attempts of the attacks has been further enhanced by the Taiwan Computing Cloud — supported by its supercomputer Taiwania 2 — which started commercial operations last month, he said.
The cloud platform has obtained ISO 27017 and ISO 27018 certificates for cloud services and private information protection, the NARL said.
Equipped with a computing capacity of 9 quadrillion floating-point operations per second (9 petaflops), Taiwania 2 was ranked the 23rd most powerful supercomputer in the latest TOP500 Supercomputer List released in June, it said.
The top five supercomputers are in the US and China.
The center also worked with the Executive Yuan’s National Information and Communication Security Taskforce to build the gaming platform for the first Taiwan-US cyberoffensive and defensive exercises with more than 10 other countries participating in Taipei earlier this week, Lin said.
Feedback from other countries should help boost the center’s capability, he said.
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