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Botnets - networks of thousands of infected computers that can be remotely controlled by a single attacker - have been a problem since 2002, when they first started be available commercially on the online black market. Spammers use them to send out floods of junk mail, and cyber criminals can commandeer them to attack the websites of online betting shops in extortion rackets.

While the botnet hotbed has traditionally been in the US - if only for the sheer numbers of online systems there - criminals

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are turning their attention to China to create botnets, essentially outsourcing their activities.

Current thinking puts the rise of zombie networks at up to 350,000 new machines a month. But CipherTrust, which makes email scanning appliances, says the email it has looked at across some 10 million inboxes, shows an even more dramatic rise: up to 157,000 newly infected machines a day. And 20 per cent of those originate in China.

However, the attacks used to create zombie networks are usually indiscriminate in their victims - the only factor affecting the geographical spread would be if the malicious code is carried in an email, the language of which would affect where it is most likely to be successful.

So the statistics are more evident of a mass of poorly protected computers coming online in China.

Dr. Paul Judge, CipherTrust chief technology officer said: 'While the information regarding the number of new zombies per day and the percent originating from China is staggering, it's not necessarily surprising given the number of new Internet users in China.'