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."
Slashdot is working with the Chinese government to further the DOS attack on CNN by leveraging it's large and generally under-sexed user base!
No, I don't, and nor does anybody else. Since when did an attack coming from a country mean the government was involved? How many domestic hacking attempts have there been against the government? Was the government hacking the government? Hardly. Given the public Chinese outcry against the West for the way we've treated the Tibet issue, isn't it quite possible, quite plausible, that a few people out of 1 321 851 888 candidates took it just a wee bit too far? Why on earth must the government be under suspicion before we even have a clue as to who did it?
-Devin Jeanpierre
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.
Yes, that would be interesting to know. But one of the more insightful views I've heard recently in the China vs. Tibet matter, is that "after so many years of communist rule, it is hard for Chinese people to make a distinction between government, communist party, policy and country". As a result, criticism of Chinese actions concerning Tibet may be felt not as attacks on policy, but attacks on the Chinese people and country. Don't know if that is true, but I'd welcome readers from China to comment on that.
There is a big difference between saying "you are bad" and saying "you are doing something bad". I guess the real gain is that more people (including the Chinese) are talking about Tibet now, and maybe someday the Chinese *people* will realize that Tibetans just want the same thing as the Chinese: run their own affairs, be left alone, and live in peace with their neighbors.
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).
Only in the most capitalistic sense of the word :P