The Chinese government neither gets involved in nor supports cyber attacks, a high-ranking official with the State Council Information Office said Tuesday, refuting recent western accusations of the government and military's involvement in hacking.

"The government has never supported or been involved in cyber attacks, and it will never do so. Those remarks are sheer nonsense," said Peng Bo, an official with the Internet bureau under the Information Office.

Some U.S. experts recently said Chinese military or government agencies might be breaking into computers to steal technology and trade secrets to help state-owned companies.

"The remarks are groundless. In fact, China is the country hit worst by worldwide hackers," Peng told Xinhua.

Peng stressed that even if an attack was traced to China, it was very likely that the attack originated in a foreign country.

"There are tens of thousands of computers in China that have been hijacked by people outside of China," Peng said.

Statistics from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center (CNCERT/CC) reveal that China is the biggest victim of Internet hacking.

In 2009, there were about 262,000 Chinese computers connected to the Internet were hijacked by Trojan programs tracked to overseas IP addresses. The top source of those Trojan Horses, 16.61 percent, were computers based in the United States.

The number of Chinese computers controlled by botnets in 2009 was 837,000. A total of 19,000 overseas hosted addresses, of which, 22.34 percent are from the US, participated in controlling the Chinese computers.

In addition, official websites of the Chinese government with the suffix "gov.cn" witnessed an accumulated 2,765 hacking attacks in 2009.

Moreover, a 2008 Internet security report by the world's largest security software maker, Symantec Corp., showed that a quarter of all hacking came from the US while 33 percent of the world's botnet servers were based in the US. By contrast, only 13 percent of computers which planted botnet programs were Chinese.

"It is unprofessional and lacking in credibility to say Chinese hackers initiated the attacks on foreign countries' computers because those attacks were traced to China," Zhou Yonglin, deputy operations director of the CNCERT/CC, told Xinhua.

A spokesman with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in late January that such accusations "are groundless and aim to discredit China."

Official data shows more than one million IP addresses are under the control of foreign forces and the number of websites tampered with by hackers exceeded 42,000 last year.

The widespread Conficker worm virus infected 18 million computers per month in 2009, the most in the world, or 30 percent of the global infected total.

According to the Internet Society of China, the number of cyber attacks from abroad saw a year-on-year increase of 148 percent in 2008.

In 2009, the CNCERT/CC removed remote control from more than 1,200 botnet servers, mostly based outside China, and by doing so helped recover the economic losses of many banks and e-business websites.