Guangzhou Information Technology Office has vowed to improve security of government websites following a spate of hacking attempts.

In a guideline issued on Wednesday, the office detailed the mechanisms to deal with hacking attempts and how they should be reported.

On May 8 and 9, the official website of Guangzhou Pricing Bureau was targeted by hackers, who changed all links to connect to pornographic websites.

On July 20, the official website of Guangzhou State Land and Housing Administration was disabled for four days by hackers, and on July 26 hackers altered the homepage of Guangzhou Information Center.

The guideline is only part of the city's efforts to protect government websites from potential attacks, said Xu Jinghong, an official with the municipal information technology office.

"The city is planning to construct a data back-up and emergency restoration system for official websites."

Also, Guangzhou will set up a unified anti-virus system for government websites and will launch a security risk appraisal for websites and Intranets of different governmental organs and public facilities across the city in the second half of this year.

"The city's endeavours aim to minimize hacker attacks on government websites in the future," Xu added.

"Some other government websites have also been attacked by hackers in the past few months, but they have not reported their attacks to us," said Gao Zhongxiao, director of Guangzhou Public Security Bureau's Internet supervision branch, at the press conference on Wednesday.

"Insufficient Internet security employees, imperfect Internet security systems and insufficient protection technology give hackers opportunities," the director noted.

Citing the outcome of a recent investigation, Gao said fewer than 20 percent of government websites had installed hacker detection systems.

Furthermore, few government departments have a mechanism to back up data, Gao said without giving an exact figure.

About 75 percent of municipal government organs have installed firewalls for their Intranet system; 87 percent of them have taken anti-virus measures for their computers; and 67 percent of them have an information security administration system, according to Gao.

(China Daily August 11, 2006)