China Plans to Strengthen Its Cybercrime Legislation

China has made significant progress in cybercrime legislation, but faces increasing challenges to keep pace with the country’s exponential growth in internet use and hackers’ attacking, according to IT World. Although the Western media has been awash with stories of Chinese hacking for years, cybercrime was until recently governed by three articles added to China’s criminal code in 1997. The laws were out-of-date and “failed to correlate proportionately with the tremendous social harm” caused by cybercrime.

Today, cybercrime in China is a vast self-perpetuating criminal industry. While current law is wholly inadequate, a new generation of legislation and internet-related government administrative regulation is now being put in place to tackle newly stipulated “criminal liabilities”. According to Reuters reported that Chinese police and judicial officials are formulating new measures that govern how hacking crimes are handled by courts, the country’s latest step to strengthen its cyber laws. China’s national political advisory body has also called for changes to a law on online information safety and other measures intended to reduce cybercrime, alongside of passing its first regulations protecting the public from cyber data theft.

However, China’s cyberlaws are still in the early stages of development. The new legislation will require the Chinese authorities to work closely with international efforts to fight cybercrime cooperatively across the global internet. In addition, China also needs to set up a concrete mechanism for work on ISPs, domain name service providers, as well as network security vendors jointly carrying out network security information sharing and fight against cybercrime.

Reference:

As Hacking Hits Home, China Strengthens Cyber Laws
http://www.itworld.com/security/67776/hacking-hits-home-china-strengthens-cyber-laws

China works to toughen hacking laws
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS45064220920100202