Chinese crackers explode onto US websites

'All your base are belong to us', says army of Chinese hackers.

The war between Chinese and US hackers is hotting up, just as the spy plane conflict is cooling. US cracker group PoizonBOx has defaced over 150 Chinese sites since a US surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet.

Chinese hackers have been urged to retaliate with a planned week-long cyber assault on US websites and networks to start on 1 May, International Labour Day.

Messages on websites such as killusa.com and sohu.com suggested that hackers attack US military sites and claimed that prime targets such as the White House website have already been hit.

The only confirmed crack connected with the crisis is the defacement of an obscure US Navy site. An animated image of a Chinese flag and anti-American graffiti in English and Chinese has now been removed from the site.

PoizonBOx has launched a concerted campaign against Chinese sites, calling it 'ChinaKiller'. The group defaces sites with a graffiti-type notice proclaiming "This Site Was Owned by PoizonBOx".

The group has already launched a private hate campaign against low-profile local authorities in the UK, such as Milton Keynes, Wiltshire, Walsall and Conwy.

The Chinese embassy in London said it had only heard reports of a hacking war. A spokesman did not know if it was illegal for a Chinese citizen to launch a cyber attack against a foreign website.

Linux systems may be the most likely target for Chinese cracker aggression as open source software is widely used in the country.

A Chinese hacker called Lion has already authored a Linux worm. Lion told Max Vision's white hat hacker site that the worm was designed to tell the world that "Chinese is not sheep".