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China Ate My Web
Site: Falun Gong Says Government Hacked Sites
By
Jonathan Dube (from: abcnews.com)
Having
shut down all of the Falun Gong Web sites in China, the government installed
filtering software to block Internet users on the Chinese mainland from accessing
Falun Gong web sites overseas. It has also launched an anti-Falun Gong Web site to
discredit the group.
And now Falun Gong practitioners say the group’s Web
sites in the United States, Canada, England and Ireland have been repeatedly
attacked and hacked — and they claim the Chinese government is responsible.
‘An Evil
Person’
Falun Gong mixes slow-motion martial arts exercises with concepts borrowed from
Buddhism and Taoism. The group was outlawed by the People’s Republic of China
on July 21 for allegedly spreading “superstitious, evil thinking.”
Since then, Webmasters for many Falun Gong sites
outside China report that their servers have been overloaded, preventing
practitioners from accessing Web pages and causing system crashes. Others have
reported being spammed by thousands of e-mails and computer-virus attacks.
Hackers have attempted to break into at least four
sites, succeeding in at least two cases. Sites in Ireland and in Nottingham,
Britain, were hacked into and anti-Falun Gong articles posted.
Bao Zhu, a Falun Gong practitioner in Dublin, Ireland,
says the site he ran, www.yuanming.org.uk
, came under continuous attack from
July 23 to July 26. At first the attackers jammed the server so that no one
could access the site. Then they hacked in, deleted all the files and replaced
them with an article, in Chinese, that had previously been distributed by the
Chinese government.
The article, a negative biography of Falun Gong founder
Li Hongzhi, says Hongzhi “is not the ‘highest Buddha’ who brings salvation
to suffering people, but an evil person who has had an extremely disastrous
effect on society … Li is not bringing salvation to practitioners, but is in
fact leading them to a disastrous and miserable end, and Falun Gong is doing
enormous harm to both the mental and physical health of people.”
Maryland Site
Attacked
Bob McWee, a Maryland practitioner who runs
www.falunusa.net,
says his site
received a denial-of-service attack, in which the attacker sent repeated
connection requests to the server from phony addresses. Because the addresses
were false, McWee’s servers were unable to respond and the flood of requests
tied up his server, preventing it from responding to valid requests. As a
result, no one could access his Web site and the server continually crashed.
With requests coming in at a rate of 20 per second, his
site was down from July 21 through July 23, until he blocked the attacks.
“When I finally figured out what it was and blocked
it, then the attacks got heavier,” McWee says. “So they definitely were
trying to bring my servers down.”
The attacks stopped Wednesday, he says.
One of the phony return addresses the attackers used
happened to be the IP address of a U.S. Department of Transportation server. As
a result, the Falun Gong sites tried to send acknowledgement messages to the DOT
server, McWee says.
When DOT officials saw the unauthorized messages coming
from sites such as www.falunusa.net, www.falundafa.ca
and
www.falundafa.org,
it
contacted the operators of the sites to find out why they were being sent,
according to McWee and other Webmasters.
Bill Adams, a spokesperson for the Transportation
Department, says the department won’t answer questions or confirm what
happened “for security reasons.”
Embassy Disavows
Knowledge
Hackers also tried to break into McWee’s site and to www.falundafa.ca but
failed. McWee and Jason Xiao, the Webmaster for www.falundafa.ca, say they
traced the hackers to an IP address from China that was registered with China
Telecom by a division of China’s Public Security Ministry.
“If they banned every Falun Gong site in China, why
not try to block them everywhere else?” McWee says. “It doesn’t surprise
me that they would attempt to do this.”
Yu Shuing, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in
Washington, says he is aware of the complaints that Falun Gong sites had been
attacked, but does not know who was responsible.
“About so-called hacking, I have no knowledge,” he
says.
In the eyes of Falun Gong practitioners, the Chinese
government is trampling on the rights of not only its own citizens but of people
in democratic societies.
“We are just volunteers maintaining our own private
site, right?” says Jillian Ye, a Toronto practitioner who operates www.falundafa.ca
and www.minghui.ca, which were attacked and inaccessible for a week.
“What strength do we have to fight back against big government if they use
their full strength to try to destroy our site? It is very unfair.”
Cuban 'Journalism
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