Chinese military and education officials have dismissed reports linking them with a cyber attack on the Internet search engine Google. In an interview with China Daily, they said that a recent accusation printed in the New York Times was false.

In its report on Thursday, the New York Times linked two Chinese higher education institutions to cyber attacks on Google.

The world's biggest search engine announced last month that it had been the target of a highly sophisticated attack in December. It said the hacking had come from a source within China.

The report claimed the two education facilities have close ties with the Chinese military and also Google's competitor in China, Baidu.

Pan Zheng, an expert from the National Defense University, told that the attacks on Google had nothing to do with the Chinese government, nor the military. He went on to say that a hacking location inside China doesn't necessarily mean the attacks were launched by the government or the military.

Major General Luo Yuan from the Academy of Military Science said that web hacking is against Chinese law. He stated that the Chinese military would not go against the rules. He claimed that it was irresponsible to blame the military when there was such a lack of evidence.

One of the accused schools is the Shandong-based Lanxiang Vocational School. School officials say they have been getting phone calls all day asking about the cyber attack. They say that the school provides lessons in I.T. and computing, and has no ties with the Chinese military.

A professor from Shanghai-based Jiaotong University, the other named Chinese institution, said he is not surprised by allegations that students hacked into websites. However he said that such acts were not malicious in motive, and that the students may simply have been testing out their Internet abilities. The professor added that the IP address of the university was often hijacked.