Slashdot Mirror
CNN Website Targeted by DoS
antifoidulus writes "CNN is reporting that they were the target of a Denial of Service attack yesterday. According to the article, there have been reports on Asian tech sites that Chinese hackers were targeting CNN for their coverage of the unrest in Tibet. One has to wonder if this hacking attempt was government sponsored or not. The Chinese government hasn't been very happy with CNN -- in fact, the Beijing Bureau Chief has been summoned about a day before this happened."
The funny thing is, China is one of the few countries in the world that truly has a great big firewall sat at the border of it's internet, so is one of the few countries that actually could do something about massive unexpected loads of outgoing traffic from it's internet.
;)
I'm not defending the great firewall of China, but I think it's worth pointing out that when the goverment has that kind of control over what does and doesn't go in and out if they wanted to they could easily do something to stop these kind of accusations surrounding large scale DoS attacks unless they're happy for them to continue in which case may the stories continue.
Of course there's always captured zombie machines outside the great firewall to do the trick, but certainly here in the UK many ISPs take note of which computers are sending out suspicious traffic, I've known a couple of people have their net access disabled by their ISP for throwing out known virus traffic at least. Most responsible ISPs worldwide could no doubt do exactly the same things.
The real question is could ISPs do this without introducing "feature" creep? My guess is, no, they'd quickly use the tools for blocking bad traffic for blocking things like BitTorrent, well, those few that don't already of course
It's a shame really that the tools are out there to prevent this kind of bad traffic, and yet the bad traffic is all to often allowed through and the tools are used to filter good traffic which is certainly the case with China. There's a question of what's good and bad traffic of course, but that's a debate for another day I think.
I ask CNN not to look for a scapegoat on this issue ... Knowing how US companies have exhibited incompetence in the past, I will not be surprised if it is the case this time round
Right! Who needs a scapegoat? Obviously this is likely the fault of US companies. There's no point blaming someone when we can blame someone that it's more slashdot-friendly to blame. The man! Teh evil corporations!
For what it's worth, I spent most of my day yesterday in rent-a-brain mode mopping up after a web site defacement that was attempted from half a dozen Chinese IP addresses, succeeded from another one, and which was throwing JS-based redirects at browsers so they'd wind up on web sites hosted in China, where trojan-flavored malware was being served up. There's no way that a country with Draconian content sniffing and a country-wide firewall like China's doesn't know when operations like that are flourishing. FWIW, the demographics targeted in this case were mil/defense types, and the visible content on the redirected target was meant to momentarily confuse people expecting that the specific content they'd have been expecting. Year Of The Rat, indeed.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
> In general I feel that whenever 'weapons' (DoS
> attacks, censorship, physical force) are used to
> end a discussion, it means that party has run
> out of reasonable arguments (and in a way,
> admits moral defeat).
If you ever have access to the discussion of those Chinese youths, you will understand the problem better. There are no longer two "parties" trying to make an "argument". They see the biased report as an intentional attacks to their country. As a person born and lived in HK for a long time, I can understand that news in Western standards normally tries to please their audience, so they are eager to report and exaggerate anything negative about China while tend to neglect or downplay positive things since they don't sell papers. Not for them. What they feel is that their voice goes nowhere except among the Chinese. Even if a large group of Chinese go to demonstrate in London and Paris, they get minimal media coverage. A small group of pro-Tibet people will get a huge noise, in contrast.
They are not just worried, but are angry, literally. If you see it, you will not be surprised by such attacks at all. It is just a matter of when. No, I don't think government intervention is required. Indeed I believe the Beijing government very much want this not to happen at all, given the upcoming Olympiads, but they probably have no way to prevent this.
It is sad that this whole thing fueled a whole generation of Chinese youth who continue to think that their country is being belittled, and think that it all comes because they are not powerful enough. Your dream just goes the reverse direction, unfortunately. But instead of being "against the Tibetans", they are "against the Western world". They more and more are thinking in the lines of "over-power the West", rather than to live in harmony with them. The main result of the current episode is a strong mutual distrust. Europeans mistrust news reported by PRC (never mind they can now report criticism as long as it is not persuading any movement threatening their rule over China), and Chinese in general mistrust any European or American reporting.