An earthquake monitoring center of the Wuhan Municipal Emergency Management Bureau was hit by an overseas cyber attack, the police in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The police said that preliminary findings show hacking organizations and criminals with foreign government backgrounds to be behind the attack, and they have launched an investigation into the case.

The China Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) and internet security company 360's monitoring found that the network at the front-end station of the Wuhan Earthquake Monitoring Center, affiliated with the bureau, was attacked by foreign organizations, said the statement.

The earthquake monitoring center sealed the relevant network equipment in time and reported the situation to the public security organ for further investigation, according to the statement, adding that the bureau reserves the right to pursue the case.

The Wuhan Municipal Public Security Bureau said in a post on Wednesday that such attacks pose serious threats to national security, and the Jianghan branch of the Wuhan Municipal Public Security Bureau has filed an investigation.

The earthquake monitoring center is another state unit that was attacked by a foreign hacker group after China's Northwestern Polytechnical University in June last year.

After the attack on the university, CVERC and 360 jointly formed a technical team to conduct a comprehensive technical analysis of the case. The findings showed that the U.S. National Security Agency-affiliated Tailored Access Operations mounted hundreds of thousands of malicious cyber attacks targeting Chinese objectives.