Depending on your perspective, Lanxiang vocational school is either the heart of a secretive global hacking conspiracy or a second-rate educational factory that is best known for churning out hairdressers and cooks.

Founded in 1984, the school takes in 20,000 students a year and has a domestic reputation for its kitchen and boutique training.

But it also has a large computer studies class. The school's catalogue boasts 10 huge, high-standard laboratories equipped with 2,000 Founder brand PCs. At one point Lanxiang said it held a Guinness world record for the room with the most computers.

The school gained notoriety in 2010 when the New York Times named it as one of two schools suspected of involvement in hacking attacks on American companies and human rights activists.

The report, which cited anonymous sources close to the investigation, suggested the strikes were linked to a specific class taught at Lanxiang by a Ukrainian professor. It traced the attacks to the IP address of one of the school's computers.

The school has repeatedly denied any involvement in computer hacking or a special relationship with the military, but it is back in the spotlight after Google said that a high-level phishing assault against overseas military targets and domestic human rights activists originated in the school's hometown of Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong.

Though the US search engine did not name the school, it has inevitably drawn attention because of last year's New York Times report.

The paper described Lanxiang as a huge vocational school established with military support that trains computer scientists for the People's Liberation Army. The report says the school's computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.

China's state media poured scorn on the reports, saying they exaggerate the influence of a technical college for students who cannot make it into university. Xinhua, China's official press agency, noted with unusual irony that the hacking allegations were the best advertisement the second-rate institution had ever had. Claiming to cite several Chinese bloggers, it said: "Many laughed at the suggestion that a simple vocational school, which mainly offers courses like cooking, auto repair, hairdressing and basic computer skills classes, had the capacity to stage the cyber attacks."

The English version of the Global Times, a Chinese newspaper known for its nationalist editorial stance, said the school had seen a surge of applicants since the US suspicions were made public.

Contacted by the Guardian, the school rejected the latest accusations. "We have nothing to do with this event," said a woman at the school office who declined to give her name. "How can we have such high technology or such elite students? It's impossible."

The allegations have raised as many questions as they answer. Without a clear trace back to the People's Liberation Army, analysts have speculated that the school's computers could as easily have been used as camouflage by the authorities as by a third party – either patriotic rogue hackers or even a third country. Unless the school opens up its computers to scrutiny this will be hard to determine. At an earlier stage of the investigation the attacks appeared to have originated in Taiwan, an ally of the US, but that has since been narrowed down. Jinan is likely to remain a focus of investigations into global hacking activity.