The U.S. Government recently scuttled a deal where the State Department would install 16,000 Lenovo computers (Lenovo is a Chinese computer manufacturer who recently purchased IBM's PC division...).

This wasn't merely chauvinism, the real concern was security.

Chinese-based hackers, especially in the Chinese province of Guangdong, have mounted systematic efforts to penetrate US government and industry computer networks in order to access secret information, according to computer security experts.

The experts and some US lawmakers believe the attacks are sanctioned by Chinese government agencies.

The attacks on the Commerce Department have been so persistent that the affected office, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), has been forced to replace hundreds of computers and set up a new computer system.

The bureau's work is sensitive because it supervises US exports of software and technology for commercial and military uses, as well as commodities.

"BIS discovered a targetted effort to gain access to BIS user accounts," said Richard Mills, a Commerce Department spokesman, without commenting on the origin of the attacks.

"They took a series of immediate action steps to ensure that no BIS data is compromised. We have no evidence that any BIS data has been lost or compromised," Mills said.

Department officials are concerned about the hacking attacks because the bureau retains sensitive commercial and economic information on US exporters as well as data related to law enforcement records.

In a bid to ramp up security, the bureau has restricted employees' Internet access to stand alone computers that are not linked to the bureau's network.

We are all going to have to get a lot smarter about computer security...