BEIJING. Dec 31: 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, reports AP.

After a summer of cyberskirmishes 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 Infected with viruses.

News that a year 2000 software glitch caused 20,000 credit-card swipe machines in

Britain to fall 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. If they mistake 00" for 1900. systems may garble data or crash.

while most computers in China were made after 1995 and are believed to be Y2K-ready. viruses abound. Experts have detected at least 24 viruses timed to go off Jan. 1. the magazine Internet Weekly reported this week. Some, it added, arc designed to behave like Y2K problems, making it more difficult to develop anti-viral programmes.

Although there is no indication any of the viruses are homegrown, "it's such a big country with all types and sorts of people that its impossible to say viruses won't appear." said Cheng Yurong. a professor at

China's top technical school, Qlnghua University, who has been seconded to the government's Y2K task force.

By official count, the Chernobyl virus, spread worldwide via the Internet this year, destroyed 360,000 computers and caused 1 billion yuan ($120 million) in losses in China despite repeated public warnings from police computer specialists.

Worries about computer viruses come as China girds Itself against hacker attacks and map out strategies for waging wars with computers.

Hackers from China and Taiwan, antagonists In a seven decade civil war. attacked each side’s Web sites in July and August as Chinese leaders threatened to take the island by force if the Taiwanese government did not retract statements Beijing took as provocative move toward outright independence.

Taiwan says it has counted 72.000 Web page attacks by Chinese in August alone, all but 165 of them foiled by Taiwanese Web operators. A Taiwanese defense official later warned that

Chinese computer warfare may be able to overwhelm the island's defenses in five years.

While no evidence has been publicly offered to show that Beijing oversaw the hacking against Taiwan, an attack on a US-based Web site for Falun Gong — the spiritual movement China banned in July as a men-• ace to communist rule — has been traced to the Public Security Ministry, which Includes the national police force.

Members of the people's Liberation Army have laid out the case for Internet Insurgency In People's Dally — the ruling Communist Party's authoritative newspaper — as well as a hot-selling book.

"A planned stock market crash, a computer virus attack, making erratic the exchange rate of an enemy's currency and . spreading rumors on the Internet about enemy leaders can all be considered new concept weapons." PLA colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsul wrote ip "Unrestricted Warfare." The battlefield will be everywhere."