The Shandong Lanxiang Vocational School (), colloquially Lanxiang (), is a vocational school in the

Tianqiao District Tianqiao District () is one of 10 urban districts of the prefecture-level city of Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province in East China, forming part of the city's urban core. It has an area of and has 688,415 permanent residents . It borders ...

Jinan Jinan is the capital of the province of Shandong in East China. With a population of 9.2 million, it is one of the largest cities in Shandong in terms of population. The area of present-day Jinan has played an important role in the history of ...

Shandong Shandong is a coastal Provinces of China, province in East China. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history since the beginning of Chinese civilization along the lower reaches of the Yellow River. It has served as a pivotal cultural ...

, China. The school was founded in 1984 and is said to have been established with support from the

People's Liberation Army The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It consists of four Military branch, services—People's Liberation Army Ground Force, Ground Force, People's ...

. The school admits about 20,000 students per year and offers courses in subjects like cooking, auto repair, construction equipment operations (specialized in excavator), hairdressing, as well as computer skills. Lanxiang North

Cyber attacks

The school has been suspected as a site from which

cyber attack A cyberattack (or cyber attack) occurs when there is an unauthorized action against computer infrastructure that compromises the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of its content. The rising dependence on increasingly complex and inte ...

s were launched in 2009 (

Operation Aurora Operation Aurora was a series of cyber attacks performed by advanced persistent threats such as the Elderwood Group based in Beijing, China, with associations with the People's Liberation Army. First disclosed publicly by Google (one of the vic ...

) and in 2011; school officials denied that their school launched the attacks. The school also hosts the

command and control server A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conne ...

for malware embedded in handled scanners built by a company physically located near the school. According to the website Week in China, this school is known for its

computer training Computer literacy is defined as the knowledge and ability to use computers and related technology efficiently, with skill levels ranging from elementary use to computer programming and advanced problem solving. Computer literacy can also refer t ...

programmes offered to Chinese students and is infamous abroad as a breeding ground for an army of hackers originating from China. The fact that the school was owned by the

until 2000 further fuelled speculation. However, ''Zhihu Daily'', a Chinese internet newspaper, reported that one its undercover journalists discovered that most of the students at this school were unmotivated farmers who would not be remotely capable of hacking US targets. It remains an open question whether this is an exercise in disinformation.

Address

The street address of the school is 11 Mid Lanxiang Road ().

References

External links

* Schools in Shandong Internet in China Jinan 1984 in Jinan {{PRChina-school-stub