The spread of computer virus " panda burning joss stick" that infected millions of computers across China in the past few months has rung alarm of rampant cyber crimes and indicated that it is a "pressing job" to formulate a law on the cyber safety, a lawmaker said on Wednesday.

"Cyber crimes have been on the rise in China, with the rapid development of the Internet," said Zhang Xuedong, who is here attending the ongoing annual full session of China's top legislature -- the National People's Congress (NPC).

The virus program "panda burning joss stick", also known as " Xiongmao Shaoxiang" in Chinese, was wrote by Li Jun, a 25-year-old resident in the central China city of Wuhan. Since he let the virus loose on the Internet last October, millions of computers have been infected nationwide, and mutations of it have been found even after Li was apprehended by the police.

This incident "has once again rung the alarm that cyber crimes are rampant in China and it is a pressing job to promulgate a law on cyber security," said Zhang.

The law on cyber security should give equal protection to all lawful computer network users, he added.

In 2005, he said, 80 percent of computer operating systems in the country were infected by virus, 728,000 new items of computer virus were reported, and 9,100 Web sites were attacked by hackers, including 2,027 government Web sites. Another 391 government Web sites were attacked by hackers in January 2006.

"What deserves our high attention is few of the cyber crime cases have been handled," he said, adding that the absence of a law against cyber crimes might be partly attributed to increasing cyber crimes.

Source: Xinhua