[ISN] Chinese dissident site hacked again

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Wed Jan 09 2008 - 00:15:04 PST


http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Emerging_Threats/Briefing/2008/01/07/chinese_dissident_site_hacked_again/3849/

By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Jan. 7, 2008 

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- A U.S.-based Web site that hosts Chinese 
dissidents' blogs is being hacked again, days after an attack took it 
offline and nearly destroyed its archives.

The Web site, Boxun.com, which hosts some 2000 blogs, was the target of 
a "very strong" distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack last 
week, its editor, Watson Meng, told United Press International.

He added that hackers probing the Web sites of several U.S. government 
agencies had "spoofed" or forged their Internet addresses to make it 
seem as if the probes came from his site.

"Our service provider received complaints from a number of government 
agencies," he said.

He said last week's attack, which lasted several hours, bombarded the 
Boxun servers with fake data requests at an average of 70 MB per second. 
"It really slowed us down," he said.

Boxun crashed altogether Dec. 24 after a massive DDOS strike and was 
only just up and running again when it was attacked again last week.

"The last couple of months we have been receiving these attacks every 
week or so," Meng said, adding that the Web site had been forced to find 
a new server host that was better able to handle the constant stream of 
attacks.

The non-profit Reporters Without Borders says Boxun is one of a number 
of Web sites carrying uncensored news and information about China that 
had been recently attacked "probably by hackers based in China," 
according to a statement. It said journalists and dissidents who write 
for Boxun from China were "particularly targeted" by authorities there.

Other observers have said recently that China is likely to embark on a 
coordinated effort to shut up and shut down critics of the Communist 
regime there in advance of the Summer Olympics.


__________________________________________________________________      
Visit InfoSec News
http://www.infosecnews.org/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Wed Jan 09 2008 - 00:23:24 PST