The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology detected a record 12.8 billion cyberattacks on government and other organizations in the nation last year, NICT officials said Monday.

The number was the largest since the government-backed institute began cyberattack surveys in 2005, they said.

"Cyberattacks from emerging countries, as well as China and the United States, have been increasing," an NICT official said.

The NICT has developed a system to determine whether access to servers at government and other organizations are cyberattacks, with roughly 210,000 sensors keeping tabs last year.

The number of NICT-detected cyberattacks found through sensors rose from around 300 million in 2005 to about 5.7 billion in 2010 and around 7.8 billion in 2012, due partly to a gradual increase in the number of sensors installed for surveillance.

The number of cyberattacks in 2013 expanded 1.6 times from the previous year, while the number of sensors rose 1.1 times.

Cyberattacks last year included distributed denial of service attacks, in which massive amounts of data were sent to down servers, as well as initial attempts to determine whether servers were vulnerable to attack.

After international hacker group Anonymous criticized Japan's whaling activities and threatened on YouTube to attack related Japanese organizations last May, NICT detected attacks on some government servers, the sources said.

While no clear country-by-country breakdown of cyberattacks was available, most of the attacks originated from China and the United States, with those from Russia and Brazil as well as from Japanese locations also increasing, they said.

However, the sources noted that the actual locations from which hackers stage cyberattacks are difficult to identify because personal computers used in the strikes can be controlled remotely.