Anonymous Claims To Have Defaced Hundreds of Chinese Government Sites

Hkibtimes writes, quoting the International Business Times: "The Anonymous hacking collective has landed in China, home of some of the most tightly controlled Internet access in the world, and defaced hundreds of government websites in what appears to be a massive online operation against Beijing. Anonymous listed its intended institutional targets on Pastebin and has now attacked them."

Comments

Must be true

[Anonymous Coward]

Visiting them I get a bunch of square blocks and some funny looking drawings.

No big deal

[na1led]

I doubt the Government would put any secret info on a website.

Re:No big deal

[Intrepid imaginaut]

It does upset the "benevolent dictatorship" propaganda the Chinese government has been putting about though, not for nothing did they start promising new freedoms immediately when they heard about the events of the Arab spring. It also occurs to me that the Anonymous group is a perfect cover for intelligence agencies to run wild on the internet.

Re:No big deal

[tlhIngan]

I doubt the Government would put any secret info on a website.

No, but imagine putting up "banned information" on those websites - the great firewall doesn't work when the information is posted online on the allowed website. And it's not something they can block, because they'd be blocking a legitimate website. (What's the government going to do - take down their own web site?).

Post said information on several other sites like the government-controlled media sites and you'd get pretty wide coverage...

Re:No big deal

[eternaldoctorwho]

I doubt the Government would put any secret info on a website.

Given what the U.S. government has been doing lately about publicly exposing "secret" information, including granting web access to core intelligence servers, I would definitely mod you as Funny. That is, I would if I had mod points.

Re:No big deal

[Krojack]

Tiananmen Square info and photos would have been idea if you ask me.

Re:No big deal

[Xest]

To be fair, you have to look at why the Chinese governments acts the way it does nowadays.

Many of those who comprise China's top leadership do actually support greater freedoms nowadays, but they're a bit more pragmatic than many would like them to be.

The fundamental problem with China is that you have a population of 1.3 billion with gross income disparity, countless opposing religious and cultural backgrounds and differing levels of attachment to the Chinese leadership.

There's this rather naive view in the west that if China just dropped it filters, and allowed free elections, a completely free press and so forth tommorrow that suddenly everything would be okay and China would become a vast bastion of freedom and democracy with modern standards of living that envy rich western nations. In reality though it's not that simple.

The problem is that if China stops controlling information and limiting the freedoms of dissidents then there would indeed be an arab spring like event, but we're not talking about Libya here with it's mere 6 million people, we're again talking about a place with 1.3 billion people. If the government loses it's stranglehold you suddenly have uighur rebellions, you have tibetan rebellions, you have the poor rising up against those who have done well from China's economic growth, you have the Taiwanese separating, Hong-Kong separating, and you have those loyal to the government fighting back against all of them. You lose what little remaining control there is of a nuclear armed North Korea, and Russia, Japan, and all of the other neighbours are given a chance to seize territory which they dispute with China. In other words you have massive regional chaos that has the potential to spill over globally.

If you actually go and visit China, those areas that have really benefited from the boom aren't actually terribly different to many western cities. Effectively the restrictions in China are aimed and prevalent mostly in areas that are poorer and particularly want to split away. You can argue that splitting away is a fair goal, and I'd agree, but if you let say, Tibet go, then other parts are bound to be emboldened by this and follow, and again you're in a position where there's a massive risk of destabilisation through separation running away with itself.

It's pretty clear that whilst the Chinese government wants to change things that to do so over night would almost certainly be much more problematic for the region and possibly the world as a whole. The Chinese government's tactic seems to be to try and spread the benefits of growth as wide and fast as they reasonably can because when a population has nice things it's far less likely to be interested in violent disruption.

China is changing, but it needs to be left to do so at it's own pace, they didn't just start promising freedoms as a result of the arab spring they were doing it before that.

The fundamental challenge China has is in providing freedoms to those Chinese now rich and educated enough to demand and fight for them, against offering too many freedoms such that those who are poor and angry cannot use them as an opportunity to try and gain their freedom violently in a manner that would cause massive scale civil war. I don't envy this pretty high stakes balancing act the Chinese government is being forced to undergo, so whilst it may appear shitty for many Chinese compared to our standards in the West I do actually think modern Chinese leadership is genuinely trying to make the best of a pretty poor situation that they've inherited.

It's worth Googling and reading about some of China's current, and future leaders (they're having a leadership change soon). Many of them are actually quite genuine about reform and do have that as the centrepiece of their policy.

Re:No big deal

[Norwell Bob]

That was a well-articulated, insightful, and enlightening post. Now I understand why they took China out of the Red Dawn remake.

Re:No big deal

[Xest]

"Taiwan has already applied to the UN, n'est pas?"

Yes, it failed largely because the PRC used it's weight, threatening to use military weight to boot if political clout failed.

I suspect Taiwan and Hong Kong will be one of the first to separate, but not until China feels comfortable that the rest of the mainland is stable enough to allow it to happen without them to doing so in a chaotic manner, but not yet.

Maybe they are trying to make up for it

[sandytaru]

- to the US, sort of a belated apology for hacking the FBI.

Naw, they probably did it for the lulz.

Hundreds, you say?

[Sarten-X]

I have also "defaced" many sites on my own. I very recently defaced Slashdot itself, with a silly message mocking a group of hacktivists for contributing approximately nothing to the world but headlines.

My message is subtle enough that it will likely remain on the site for the remainder of its existence. Anonymous can't say the same for their messages.

Re:Hundreds, you say?

[Bevilr]

Except that by generating headlines, the repositories of those headlines (like /. here) will store the articles concerning those events. The only way their message (albeit not a very productive one in my opinion) will disappear forever will be if the articles covering it do too, and when that happens you can bet your comment on it will disappear as well.

Re:why not the message in Chinese?

[Anonymous Coward]

This!

If you throw stones at a fortress, the fortress sends out its archers and fortifies its walls.

Just the first one defaced?

[buck-yar]

The first one on the pastebin list definitely looks defaced. I tried random ones down the list, can't find any others that are hacked.

Re:Just the first one defaced?

[buchner.johannes]

Pretty interesting: Aside from a free mp3 hosted on a private site it comes with a tutorial for safe browsing recommending (HTTPSEverywhere, Tor) http://www.qnwqdj.gov.cn/tuto.htm .

Would be more effective if it was written in Chinese I guess.
And if they had actually hacked more than one site.
And if the protest came from inside China rather than outside.

Looks to me like a single, rather unsuccessful script kiddie with political interests rather than the "Anonymous hacking collective".

Re:why not the message in Chinese?

[Anonymous Coward]

few Chinese citizen ....and most will buy into government propaganda of the west attacking the China

You give the Chinese people way too little credit. Remmber Tiananmen Square? The Chinese do.

And as far as others saying stuff about a type of Chinese Spring - it won't happen until their economy starts to slow down. As long as the Chinese workers can make their comparable better (much better than in rural China) living with their booming economy, their happy. But wait until things start slowing down. Then you'll see the protests and tanks rolling.

Blew it

[DigiShaman]

They blew an opportunity to enlighten the people of China about freedom, democracy, and how the current government can foster this change through internal reforms without a confrontational tone. The process is more slow, and there's already progress being made with each change of leadership. I'm afraid all this will do is cause a reactionary clamp-down on even more freedoms.

Or to put it anther way. These people do not have guns! They cannot fight a revolution. It's folly to think they can. In fact if I recall, the PLA station soldiers far away from where the live. This way it makes it much easier to follow order and shoot their own civilians without hesitation.

Re:Blew it

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese people are plenty enlightened... The reason the communist party there has lasted so long despite having jumped the shark a long time ago is that they give the people what they want. Give economic freedom and most Chinese won't complain about the government. You want to see change? Find a way to cause the Chinese economy to implode. But that won't be very good for the rest of the world, so no sane government would try to cause that to happen.

Anyway as a few have noted, this will not be viewed the same way by the Chinese people. Particularly because they didn't even bother to translate their message. It will come off as some western yahoos who don't get China.

Any Chinese on Slashdot?

[iONiUM]

I'm curious if there's any Chinese (either from mainland using Tor or whatever), or those who have left, that can comment accurately on the citizens status with the government. As in, if they don't like their government, or if they are okay with it.

Re:Any Chinese on Slashdot?

[TheSync]

As in, if they don't like their government, or if they are okay with it.

I suspect Chinese feel their government is much better now that it isn't starving tens of millions of people to death or commiting widespread violent political persecution especially given that over 100 million Chinese have been brought out of absolute poverty.

But at some point, these relative enhancements in government performance may no longer seem enough.

Re:Any Chinese on Slashdot?

[mcgrew]

This is an old anecdote from the early 1980s so I don't know what it's like now, but I worked at Disney World then and had free reign over pretty much the whole place.

I was "backstage" as they call it, behind the China pavillion at Epcot and struck up a conversation with a fellow who had just arrived from China. He was excited about our country and its great leader, so I set him straight about that doddering old fool Reagan. The poor fellow got nervous, looking around as if the FBI was going to jump out and drag me away for my blasphemy. I doubt you'll get a truthful opinion about their government from them.

It made a big impression om me, I'll tell you.

Re:Any Chinese on Slashdot?

[AnonyMouseCowWard]

I've left, know plenty that have left, and know plenty that are still there. Obviously take my comments with a grain of salt, since it's anecdotal.

The majority of people I met/know don't even talk about censorship or lack of rights. However, that's not indicative of fear, but rather of the fact it's just not something most people talk about in the first place. I have met guys that left China for the very purpose of escaping the regime to go to a place with more human rights; they're the Slashdot crowd-type of people, that proxy out to see all of the Internet. Most people though, including my family, don't care so much. Their quality of life has vastly improved in the past 50 years. They are no longer afraid of starving, have a roof on top of their head, and the country is not constantly attacked and/or screwed over by foreign superpowers or civil war.

I am not saying the government is perfect, and everyone knows there are plenty of people in disagreement. Usually, those people are the ones 1. getting screwed by the government 2. with enough money and free time to think about democracy. Number one is hard to avoid, because the Chinese government is very utilitarian. When you manage 1.3b+ people, there are choices that need to be made, and they won't please everyone. Number two will only go increasingly, as the population gets richer, but at this point I don't see it as being a major issue. Compare that to people just about anywhere? Not everyone cares about what the TSA does, because it doesn't really affect them, the issues are there, but people live with it as long as they can have a comfortable life.

Now this would be news...

[PerlPunk]

Chinese Government Claims To Have Defaced Hundreds of Anonymous Sites

Re:why not the message in Chinese?

[Chakra5]

You give the Chinese people way too little credit. Remmber Tiananmen Square? The Chinese do.

Yeah but most of them "remember" only what the party line was. I dated a gal from China a few years back who was a quite intelligent and reasonable individual living in the west, and she was quite perplexed by the western "portrayal" of that incident. ...remember that they aren't seeing what you and I are seeing, even when it's inside their own country.

Did they do this...

[x0]

...before or after they 'shut down the internet' last weekend?

m

anon china twitter

[core_tripper]

https://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousChina

Punishment

[future assassin]

Will any admins or the people who run those sites now be punished by the CN gov to show them as an example to others to keep security tight?

probably a nameserver hack

[Errtu76]

So they 'hacked' a DNS service and then claim to have defaced hundreds, if not thousands of websites. Big deal. Come back when you effectively disabled the Great Firewall.

Re:probably a nameserver hack

[tist]

Actually... I assume the "defacing" is quite clear in Chinese. A look at a dozen or so sites doesn't look like any huge defacing has been done. Images seem intact, English text sill clear enough.... Hard to verify.

Re:probably a nameserver hack

[SplashMyBandit]

I think Anonymous mostly use scripts for finding and exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities - you know, on websites that take user input without scrubbing it properly for SQL commands and escapes. Very basic stuff really. While Anonymous like to think they are l33t the real problem is that so many websites just have astonishingly terrible security. Now I'm sure some Anonymous members have more capabilities than this, but certainly not all of them.

info about the hacked site

[core_tripper]

The Chinese characters on the site mean "A friend in need is a friend indeed"
The song playing (for those who don't know) is Teenage Wasteland by the Who.

Re:info about the hacked site

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Baba O'Riley by the Who.

Re:info about the hacked site

[mcgrew]

The song's title isn't Teenage wasteland, it's Baba O'Riley, although most people think Teenage Wasteland is the title.

Anonymous way off the mark on this one

[aschoeff]

Anonymous look the imperialist assholes with this totally counterproductive stunt. They need to see how offensive they have been in their misguided "quest." to "free" the Chinese people. I'm so embarrassed this has been done.

Re:Anonymous way off the mark on this one

[atriusofbricia]

Anonymous look the imperialist assholes with this totally counterproductive stunt. They need to see how offensive they have been in their misguided "quest." to "free" the Chinese people. I'm so embarrassed this has been done.

Setting aside whether this was a great idea or not... I'm not entirely sure what the hell you're trying to say. Are you saying the Chinese are already free and therefore don't need to be "freed"? While I admittedly didn't bring up the "hacked" pages, what was so offensive about it?

Re:Anonymous way off the mark on this one

[aschoeff]

When you think you're doing something for somebody's own good without consulting them, you can essentially be seen as doing it in their name and/or infantilizing them. Not only did this potentially cause danger to many of China's citizens, as your motto says, but they likely didn't appreciate it in form at all. You don't see reports of similar incidents on the mainland done by nationals. Just totally counterproductive and it embarrassed me.

Re:Anonymous way off the mark on this one

[atriusofbricia]

When you think you're doing something for somebody's own good without consulting them, you can essentially be seen as doing it in their name and/or infantilizing them. Not only did this potentially cause danger to many of China's citizens, as your motto says, but they likely didn't appreciate it in form at all. You don't see reports of similar incidents on the mainland done by nationals. Just totally counterproductive and it embarrassed me.

I see what you're saying and in general agree with the idea that such actions could be taken to infantilize those who are ostensibly being helped. I also agree that such actions on the part of Anonymous are rarely productive and at best fall in the category of "look at me!". That said, how would this cause danger to China's citizens? Unless you're referring to the possibility of a general reaction on the part of the government?

To what end exactly

[Chakra5]

Just consider how you would react if a group of Chinese "hacktavists" defaced a bunch of local sites in order to bring our attention to the issues in our system. What a wonderful benefit that would be right?

Wrong

This is doing exactly zero good as far as I can see, and probably is doing some damage to the very cause they appear to be championing.

Re:To what end exactly

[bistromath007]

Naw, this system has some pretty terrible issues, and if some random Chinese people could see them despite what's wrong with their system, I'd consider that pretty damning.

Re:To what end exactly

[Chakra5]

As I hope would I, but are you honestly saying that most people would as well? or would they take offense at being lectured too?

As much as we all want to believe we'd be ever so enlightened in viewing such an event with an honest introspection, it's human nature to take offense when someone outside the tribe bitchslaps you.

There's one surfire way to tell if this is legit..

[bistromath007]

How do you say "pool's closed" in Mandarin?

No good will come from this.

[DroolTwist]

Unfortunately, the Chinese government will most likely crack down even harder on people, especially those that followed the link for more information. So while Anonymous got more 'hacktivism' published, the people they did this for will be the ones punished.

Re:There's one surfire way to tell if this is legi

[DroolTwist]

How do you say "pool's closed" in Mandarin?

Yunowata

Re:why not the message in Chinese?

[jimbolauski]

I wonder how many Chinese are aware of Tienanmen Square? I remember access to that information being blocked, so it's tough to say how many Chinese are aware of the event. Remember it's not the well educated that have a good life that are going to start the uprising it's the ones who have nothing to lose, those are the ones that are not as informed and the propaganda is targeting.

Re:why not the message in Chinese?

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

They are also conditioned to not think about those kinds of things even if they know all about it. It's really quite uncanny. They understand that it's easier for them to not worry about stuff like that and that's what happens.

Blame the US

[deciduousness]

Seems like China would just blame the US government... the same way that if we see any attacks from China, we blame the Chinese government.

noobs

[Nyder]

Slashdot has slashdotted 1000's of web sites, anonymous needs to get cracking.

Re:why not the message in Chinese?

[SplashMyBandit]

The Chinese are well aware of the event. They just happen to know the Party line on it, rather than what really happened. The Party makes sure the real goings-on remain suppressed while promoting their own version of events and the motivations of the protestors. This is why rational Chinese people come to the conclusions that it was a good thing the protestors (they are taught they were separatists and terrorists) were ruthlessly (and fatally) suppressed. I have heard such things from otherwise reasonable Chinese people I worked with in Asia.

All governments and corporations try to control how events are perceived. However, the Chinese government does this in a very extensive way. Unfortunately the Chinese people are so oppressed in terms of thought crimes (although they would never think of it in those terms) they it is easier for them to keep their mouth shut about the bad things they see going on around them. The Chinese Government is nominally Communist with some free-market reforms. This wouldn't be so bad if there was the Rule of Law, progressive social programmes, and some regulation of entrepreneurial endeavours) but in actuality you get the repression of a paranoid government, pervasive corruption of state enterprises, capitalists unconstrained by law or labour considerations, and a desperate population having to put up with it. Things slowly seem to be getting better (recent anti-corruption drives) but it is certainly no People's Utopia at the moment.

Re:why not the message in Chinese?

[ex0duz]

You give the Chinese people way too little credit. Remmber Tiananmen Square? The Chinese do.

Yeah but most of them "remember" only what the party line was. I dated a gal from China a few years back who was a quite intelligent and reasonable individual living in the west, and she was quite perplexed by the western "portrayal" of that incident. ...remember that they aren't seeing what you and I are seeing, even when it's inside their own country.

Your post doesn't say anything. What was she 'perplexed' about? Is this somehow meant to have a negative connotation? Why does this even matter..? ie Anedoctal evidence, gotta love it. But since i'm also chinese living in western country/society, and i was also born and raised there so i don't have the 'party line' education that she had, so i'll share some anecdotal evidence of my own..

What was the 'western portrayal' vs the 'chinese portrayal'(if it exists)? I doubt either of their 'portrayals' are the full truth and they both take liberties which would help their 'cause' or 'national interests'(whatever that may be). I would trust foreign news corps(like Fox News/CNN/MSNBC etc) reporting on China as much as i would trust MSM in the US discussing Ron Paul, or as much as i would trust reporters from RT reporting about the Kremlin(or lack of). Or as much as i trust congress in not being corrupt and bought out by lobbyists/corporations. Etc etc.

If your ex GF was as smart as you claim, she would of known a way to get around any great firewall stuff and she should still be able to get the same search results for 'tiananmen' as we do. Just because they have a different opinion(i'm guessing i have a different one that you, even though i am ethnically chinese and i was born, grew up, and still live in western society), it doesn't mean they are 'confused', ignorant, or 'brainwashed' as many like to claim. Like a poster said above, you give the chinese too little credit. They know probably more than you do about their society/culture/history/government. And i'm guessing the majority just don't really care about politics and who has power, as long as their lives are improving(which is undeniable, and at one of the greatest rates in human history).

If it's 'brainwashing' that you're concerned about, then that's natural and that's just nationalism. But every country has that. Access to information, China regulates harder, but for anyone with brain and some tech savvy, they should be able to get around most if not everything, and do it quite easily at that. There's no way that China would take the net away from the middle class these days. And once that middle class keeps growing(right now most are poor rurals) and gets big enough, they will demand change and hopefully get it. But what kind of net would they get by then?

The west seems to be heading towards the Chinese direction when it comes to net and censorship, and in the 'IP wars', of which is a battle that the west(and japan) cannot win. So even if there is chinese 'freedom' of press and information on the net etc in the coming decade or two, there will probably be nothing left and they would probably have to crack down even harder if they want to be part of the 'international community'(of the west, and rather, their GOVERNMENTS AND NOT THE PEOPLE, since no one supports net regulation unless it's for REAL CRIME like kiddie porn and just common sense stuff that should be and CAN be ENFORCED). ACTA, PIPA, SOPA, CISPA, FUCKOFFTA.

But yeah, us overseas born and living western educated Chinese aren't much different from those living in HK, mainland China, SAR's, or even TW etc. We're all ethnically Chinese, and most of HAN Chinese and we have a long and proud history/culture that is still thriving and which we should see more of as the middle class grows and they start calling for more net reforms.. We can and often do also support the 'party', or rather, the government of China and their actions in th

Wrong target

[ThatsNotPudding]

The 'government' of the state of Arizona seems just as deserving. Used the think of the Grand Canyon and Garry Shandling when Arizona came up, but ever since the MLK holiday debacle, it feels like the entire state is dedicated to a faithful re-enactment of the Jim Crow south.

Losing face

[unix_core]

Now that's what I call losing face!