Cyber Attacks against Tibetan Communities

UnderAttack writes "The SANS Internet Storm Center reports about an increasing number of sophisticated and targeted cyber attacks against Tibetan NGOs. These attacks appear to be related to attacks against other anti-chinese groups like Falun Gong. 'There is lots of media coverage on the protests in Tibet. Something that lies under the surface, and rarely gets a blip in the press, are the various targeted cyber attacks that have been taking place against these various communities recently. These attacks are not limited to various Tibetan NGOs and support groups. They have been reported dating back to 2002, and even somewhat before that, and have affected several other communities, including Falun Gong and the Uyghurs.'"

Comments

Re:govt-sponsored

[KiloByte]

Possibly you're right. But I wouldn't be surprised if something much worse than [...] You have a strange way of saying "I could bet my life that".

In my dad's school, one of the kids started laughing when the grave news of Stalin's death were announced. The next day, his whole family went missing.
The China is still in the phase of jailing folks over what their kid said...

Mainstream coverage of the attacks

[Anonymous Bullard]

The Washington Post (article reprinted) has a more mainstream-orinted story on these attacks.

It should be emphasized that the exiled Tibetan groups based in India are extremely vulnerable to China's attacks and snooping since they often operate on aging hardware running obsolete and unpatched Windows software, partly out of necessity since some Tibetan-language word-processing tools that they're familiar with only run on obsolete MS platforms and partly because they're only now beginning to realize that Linux can also be made to work for them both on the servers and desktops. In fact the government in neighboring Bhutan has already created a comprehensive Dzongkha (a Tibetan-like language using the same script) version of Linux.

Equally huge problem is that most Tibetans in exile will naturally try to communicate with their family and friends back in the Chinese-occupied Tibet, but they don't realize that their unencrypted emails, "yahoo chats" and mobile text messages are all being monitored and logged by the Chinese authorities. Even if they don't exchange any sensitive information, simply receiving messages from outside China's control makes any Tibetan a suspect. Actually just being a Tibetan makes one a suspect under the eyes of the Chinese colonial masters...

Re:Mainstream coverage of the attacks

[Anonymous Bullard]

Interesting that you should bring up the comparison to the European colonists and native Americans. A couple of years back the Tibetan rights activists got hold of a Chinese Communist Party (Department of Propaganda) manual for their frontline workers involved in arguing the CCP's side online and in the western media. This Guilt Trip argument that the Western colonial powers had done similar things in their history was top of the list. However for some reason they completely refrain mentioning the last dictatorships that engaged in such genocidal expansionism: Stalin (who Mao got his ideas from) and Hitler.

Also, the "West" (i.e. the western countries that engaged in colonialism; most did not and many were victims of their neighbours in Europe, too) has long ago seen the criminality of the old ways and has since sought to undo past damages. The fact that some colonial powers wiped out indigenous cultures, just like China has been doing to its past near-neighbours for centuries and millenia (check sometimes where the Han-chinese actually originate from), but later saw the error of their own ways should in fact give them some authority to speak from experience. If my great-great-great-.....great-grandparents were sent overseas by their unelected masters to do what we now know to be crimes against humanity, should I not be able to condemn those acts??

Do you think it is reasonable or even understandable for China to be committing such genocidal colonialism today (since the 1950 invasion), all the while keeping their own population in complete darkness over what really is happening and what the Tibetans really want in their own country?

And therein lies another massive difference between the tribal native cultures of the "new continents" and the Tibetans. The Tibetans were not only China's historical neighbours, with wars and peace treaties of their own (including an eternal peace treaty with the Chinese after the Tibetans had invaded the capital of China in the first century B.C.), their own army, central government, currency, postal system etc. The Chinese claims over Tibet are all the more ridiculous when they start referring to the Yuan dynasty... Those were the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan who had invaded China too, and who agreed to a priest-patron relationship (without de facto control over governance) as protectors of Tibet after converting from Islam to Buddhism!

When the Mongol empire broke up, the remaining Chinese quarter continued the Buddhist relationship with Tibet (i.e. the "primitive" Tibet was trusted to provide spiritual services to the Chinese courts for centuries...), but nominally claimed Tibet as part of the known Chinese empire (just like they did with all their other neighbours), still without de facto rule over its affairs. And somehow that spiritual relationship was carried into the 20th century by the newly-crowned communist emperor "religion is poison" Mao whose first task after coronation was to send his communist army to invade (the CCP term is "peaceful liberation") Tibet for real.

Who told you that "the Chinese government has been doing this (genocidal subjugation) to Tibet for a period of centuries now"??

But nice going, the Guilt Trip argument again succeeded in deflecting some of the spotlight off the current and ongoing crimes by the Chinese regime against the Tibetan nation.

Now go and watch a documentary about the Tibetans living and dying under the Chinese occupation today, not in the 15th or 18th century when people still had no say in their own affairs anywhere. The events in that documentary, which includes footage and interviews from the last major uprising in Lhasa and its aftermath twenty years ago, resembles eerily the current crackdown being executed by the Chinese military and paramilitary since last week.

Re:Rage Against the Chinese?

[mgabrys_sf]

Probably because the plight is still under wraps. The information we've gotten to date has really been pretty sparse and it seems to be harder to openly support actions that even the Dali Lama has been outspoken against. I sympathize with the fact that the people reacting today are young and have been detached from the Lama for several DECADES and are living in the thick of it and are not expatriates in another area, but I'm not one to say - "yea - go for it - stick it to the man" - because fuck-all good it did in 1989.

It can be best summed up in the famous tank photo. That photo of a man standing in front of the tanks heading to Tiananmen Square has been oft-touted as a photo that "changed the world". But that's always been bullshit. It didn't change a damn thing and was a harbinger of what was about to happen which was total suppression and annihilation. When the tanks moved against their own people in Russia - THAT was a game-changer. In China - it's business as usual and whether you position yourself in front of tanks or type in blogs and forums - it's not going to change anything. Sorry - but it's not.

Now, it's fun to embarrass them on the world stage, and watch them lose face. Probably why I'm going to watch the protesters in San Francisco when that stupid torch comes through with more than a little glee. It's also fun to bait them online for being such idiots because they have been utterly removed from any and all historical data on their govt on the various forums they have been spamming recently. But I don't think for a minute that it's going to change dick.

Re:govt-sponsored

[XchristX]

The Chinese government is red-faced on this and it hasn't even begun to wreak its vengeance. It's already well under way. Chinese communist sympathizers have been engaging in a fair bit of historical revisionism and propaganda on the internet about these incidents. Check out the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_unrest_in_Tibet) , for instance, where CCP communist shills in the diaspora have been edit-warring in gangs to make the Tibetans look like the bad guys (compare that ridiculous piece of biased rubbish there with less unreliable sources(http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=19922&article='Beijing+orchestrating+Tibet+riots').

It continues to amaze me that a free and proletarian medium like the internet can be abused by a sufficiently determined group like the Chinese CCP and their global network of apologists and propagandists to spread misinformation and whitewash their atrocities. It's sickening.