Facing increasing cyber espionage from China, the German Government has decided to set up a national Cyber Defence Centre to combat the menace of hackers.

The German intelligence services have received information that cyber attacks on the computers of the government departments grew rapidly this year, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said yesterday.

Over 1,600 cyber attacks, mostly from China, were registered by the country's external intelligence service BND between January and September compared to around 900 attacks reported last year, he said.

To ward off such attacks from China and other countries in future, the government is planning to build a cyber defence shield around its ministries and high-level military and security establishments, the spokesman said.

The national Cyber Defence Centre, to be set up by next year, will coordinate various initiatives to combat the menace of cyber attacks from abroad.

The proposed centre, to be located at Federal Office for Information Technology Security, will work together with the domestic and external intelligence services, disaster relief centre and other governmental organisations and industry and internet service providers.

The German government is concerned that computer hackers might launch cyber attacks in future to cripple power plants, power supply systems, pipelines or other public utilities.

Therefore, the government is also planning to hold next year a mock cyber attack code-named "Lukex 2011" together with the federal states, municipalities and the disaster relief centre to beef up the defence against cyber attacks.

The WAZ newspaper reported earlier that computer hackers in China have stepped up their efforts to break into the computers of the German government and to gain access to secret political, military and economic information and in most cases Chinese government departments were behind the attacks.

The Chinese cyber espionage attacks are often launched by e-mails. If an attachment is opened, the spy ware will be installed on the German computers that establishes a link with China for transferring confidential information, the newspaper said quoting intelligence sources.

Computer hackers have already in 2007 demonstrated their ability to paralyse for 20 days the computers of the government and the banks in the Baltic republic of Estonia.

The "Stuxnet" attack against Iran's nuclear power programme in June marked the first professional deployment of such computer virus.

It was the first malicious programme capable of taking control of industrial plants.