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

[mrbluze]

And since guys doing such things for fun are nearly entirely pro-Tibet, who is left as the only interested party?

Possibly you're right. But I wouldn't be surprised if something much worse than cyber-attacks is awaiting the freedom-seeking Tibetans.. err, 'Terrorists', after the Olympic Games are finished.

The Chinese government is red-faced on this and it hasn't even begun to wreak its vengeance.

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...

Rage Against the Chinese?

[SlashWombat]

Several replies and no-one has really been on topic. Doesn't anybody care about the plight of the Tibetans?

I know Americans are all "gung ho" when it comes to invading countries that are important to it AKA Iraq, Vietnam ... but surely this has not diminished your sense of pity for others. (Or, perhaps it does, seems that it might explain many mysterious things.)

China forced its way into Tibet quit some time ago, and now seem to be systematically destroying the Tibetan culture. Yet the Chinese shit in the face of anything that might detract from their own cultural identity.

Aren't you guys ashamed? Or have all your high falutin morals gone down the drain!

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.

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

[asuffield]

I don't think the Chinese government thinks of Tibetans as automatic suspects, exactly. If there is anything that this whole affair reminds me of, it is the systematic extermination of the native Americans by the colonists. Han Chinese colonists move in and are supported by their government; natives can abandon their own culture and integrate into the Han nation (where they will be more or less accepted in time), or they can be shoved to one side and left to die out. Natives who oppose this get armies sent after them; those who don't oppose it get ignored. It's all stuff that we've seen before in history classes.

The Chinese government has been doing this to Tibet for a period of centuries now (with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on what else was going on at the time), and their reaction to people who say that Tibet is an independent nation is very similar to the reactions of US colonists to people who said the same things about the natives there (it basically amounts to "We're taking it, so this land is ours, and all those squatters can just go die in a hole"). The colonists do of course blame the natives for clinging to their culture instead of adopting the new, obviously superior one that is taking over.

Re:govt-sponsored

[PopeRatzo]

I don't know why the international community isn't using the Olympics to put pressure on China regarding Tibet.

A threat of a boycott would do wonders for China's behavior. We dropped out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow for the same reasons, and the Soviet Union fell in the next decade (not that they were directly related).

But it seems most of the world's leaders are so busy sucking at the teat of China's huge market and cheap labor and doesn't want to scotch a sweet economic deal. Or I guess I should say the people the world's leaders work for are the ones who won't allow a boycott.

I know I won't watch the Olympics this year. Not One Bit.

Re:They are terrorists!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there,

Do you have sources for this 'information' ?

Completely unrelated : is your paycheck in Chinese currency ?

(Also, you sound like that guy that keeps sending me emails from Nigeria. Where are my 149.000.000.000 dollars ?)

"anti-chinese groups like Falun Gong."

[1u3hr]

WTF with: "anti-chinese groups like Falun Gong"??

Most Falun Gong ARE Chinese. The government does not like them, fearing an organised group, though religious, could turn political, but to identify this as "anti-Chinese" is really nonsensical. (Americans might like to compare with the "Why do you hate America?" jibes made to demonise political opponents.)

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.