Speaking at the CanSecWest security conference last week, Wei Zhao, CEO of Knownsec, a Beijing security company, said that while many Chinese workers may be feeling hard times, business is still booming in the country's cybercrime industry. "As the stock market dropped like a stone, a lot of IT professionals lost lots of money on the stock market," he said. "So sometimes they sell 0days," he said, referring to previously unknown software bugs.

"China is not only the world's factory, but also the world's malware factory," Zhao said.

China's red-hot economy has been hit by the global recession, and while the economy is still growing, technology companies such as Intel, Motorola and Lenovo have all laid off employees in China in recent months.

Last December, Chinese hackers found a previously undisclosed 0day vulnerability in Internet Explorer. When employees of Zhao's company inadvertently published details of the bug on a public forum, Microsoft was sent scrambling to patch the issue.

Chinese hackers tend to focus on hacking software that runs on the desktop, rather than the server, because the underground market pays big money for client-side bugs, which are then often used to install malicious software on millions of desktops.