Snowden claims raise alarms on internet security upgrades in China

US whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s claims about Washington surveillance will prompt China to upgrade its internet security, experts said on Thursday.

Liu Qing, chief executive of rednetunion.com, an internet security company based in Shanghai, said the hacking news appeared to confirm that the US views China as a major rival and potential threat.

If China wanted to raise its defence against cyber attacks, Liu said, it must further develop its online technology. He said that because global internet data passes through servers hosted in the US, "the country provides more convenience to hack other countries,” he told the South China Morning Post, after Snowden said the US has been hacking computers on the mainland and in Hong Kong for years.

Snowden, a 29-year-old American who blew the whistle on the US National Security Agency’s surveillance programme, said he believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland.

Liu said China would need to invent its own IPv6 identification system, or computer operating system that would be equivalent to the Windows system.

Still, the news was not shocking to Liu. “In fact, many countries use hacking as a highly efficient technology to obtain information that will benefit their countries,” he said.

Another security expert said Snowden had raised an alarm about cyber security. “We should raise our guard on internet security,” said Tang Wei, of Beijing Rising International Software Company, one of the largest online security companies in China.