Staff Writer Attacked by Taiwanese hackers and flirting with Internet warfare, China has stepped up efforts to guard against viruses and other assaults on its computer systems while passing into the new millennium. After a summer of cyber-skirmishes with rival Taiwan, the Chinese government ordered all agencies and state industries this month to be on guard against viruses and hacker attacks at the new year. The national police force issued a countrywide alert warning computer troublemakers they will be prosecuted.
China poses a special risk for viruses.
Although a concerted, if belated, government effort has supposedly purged Year 2000 computer glitches from key systems, it could do little about China's thriving market in pirated software. Even government ministries have used illegal software, some of it contaminated. News that a Year 2000 software glitch caused 20,000 credit-card swipe machines in Britain to fail sent Chinese troubleshooters hurriedly checking China's banking systems Thursday, said Liang Juan, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Information Industry's Y2K task force. She said no problems were detected. Year 2000, or Y2K, problems may crop up in older computers or microchips that use only two digits to record years.