China's Internet security watchdog said on March 10 that a growing number of Chinese public institutions and companies have been threatened by cyberattacks from other countries or regions.

The news portal China.com.cn, people.com.cn and Tibet.cn have all been victims of attacks from foreign Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in the past two months, according to a report issued by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center.

A total of 85 websites of public institutions and companies were hacked from September 2012 to February 2013, including government agencies, a provincial examination authority, a property insurance company and a virus research facility in central China, according to the report.

It noted that attacks on 39 of those websites were recorded from IPs within the United States.

From November 2012 to January 2013, the China National Vulnerability Database also recorded 5,792 hacking attempts from U.S. IP addresses, said the report.

Moreover, in the past two months, 6,747 overseas servers were found to use trojans or botnets to control nearly 1.9 million mainframes in China, and 2,194 of these servers were located in the United States, making it the largest point of origin for cyber attacks against China, said the report.