Taiwan was ranked seventh on a list of 177 countries and regions identified as sources of Internet attacks, according to a survey released on Tuesday by a US-based security firm.
The State of the Internet Report survey from Akamai Technologies ranked Taiwan seventh on the list for the first quarter of the year, since the country accounted for 2.5 percent of all cyberattacks worldwide.
Asked about the results of the survey, Hsiao Hsiu-chin (蕭秀琴), director of the Executive Yuan’s Office of Information and Communication Security, said government agencies have taken steps to strengthen information security, but the private sector needs to do more. Cyberattacks include active attacks and attacks manipulated by others, Hsiao said, adding that Taiwan itself is a target of online attacks.
It is easy to be manipulated by others or to become a stepping stone for hackers planning to initiate attacks, she said.
In the survey, China remained at the top of the list, but its share of all attacks dropped to 34 percent from 41 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. China was followed by Indonesia, whose share of cyberattacks surged to 21 percent from just 0.7 percent in the prior quarter. The third-largest source was the US, but its share dropped to 8.3 percent from 10 percent earlier. The others among the top 10 sources of cyberattacks were Turkey (4.5 percent), Russia (2.7 percent), India (2.6 percent), Brazil (2.2 percent), Romania (2.0 percent) and Hong Kong (1.6 percent).
Taiwan had also ranked seventh in the previous survey for the fourth quarter of last year, making up 3.7 percent of total online attacks.
Based in Massachusetts, Akamai is a cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods