China on Monday accused the United States of having carried out "
tens of thousands
" of cyber attacks against it, which made it possible to steal sensitive data, in particular from a research university.
Washington regularly points the finger at Beijing for hacking American companies or government agencies, against a backdrop of rivalry between the two powers.
China still strongly denies these accusations and says it is itself the victim of cyber attacks from the United States.
However, it rarely presents concrete examples of alleged attacks.
But a report released Monday by China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) accuses the NSA, the US military intelligence agency, of "carrying
out tens of thousands of malicious cyberattacks
in China “
in recent years
”.
Read alsoDisinformation, cyber-attacks: the new world war
The NSA was made famous by one of its former computer scientists, the American Edward Snowden, who revealed the existence of a global surveillance system for communications and the Internet.
The report accuses a branch of the NSA, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), of having infiltrated Northwestern Polytechnic University, headquartered in Xi'an (north China).
This higher education establishment, funded by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, specializes in aeronautical and space research.
"Tens of thousands of equipment"
CVERC accuses TAO of having "
taken control of tens of thousands of network equipment
" from the university, such as servers, terminals and routers, allowing it to access "
essential technical data
" such as Passwords.
The TAO "
stole more than 140 gigabytes of high-value data
" with the help of European and South Asian organizations, says the report, co-authored with Chinese firm Qihoo 360, which specializes in cybersecurity and antivirus.
Questioned on the subject on Monday, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, considered that these alleged cyber-attacks put "
seriously at risk the national security of China
".
"
We demand an explanation from the United States and an immediate halt to these wrongdoings
," she told reporters.
The NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.
US IT giant Microsoft said last year that a group of Beijing-backed hackers exploited security flaws in its email services to steal user data.
China had denied it and in return accused the United States of being “
the world champions of malicious cyber-attacks
”.
