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ABCnews.com: China Ate My Web Site

April 27, 2000 |  

"Recently, almost every Falun Gong contact person whose email address appears on Falun Gong websites has been bombarded with hundreds of email messages, some even received over 20,000 messages.á It showed that the senders' addresses are in China.á From the technology used, such as changing senders' identity and etc., it is obvious that the attack was well planned and professionally done.á Read the report of August, 1999 below to see how Falun Gong websites were viciously attacked last year."


Falun Gong Says Government Hacked Sites

Members of the Falun Gong sect meditate outside of the Hong Kong branch of the Chinese news agency Xinhua, Friday, July 30, 1999, one day after Chinese authorities ordered the arrest of the sect's founder and leader Li Hongzhi. (Anat Givon/AP Photo)


By Jonathan Dube

Aug. 6 After watching the Falun Gong meditation sect grow to millions of people via the Internet, the Chinese government is now trying to harness the power of the Internet to silence the movement.
áááá 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 sites overseas. It has also launched an anti-Falun Gong Web site to discredit the group.
áááá And now Falun Gong practictioners say the groups 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 Peoples Republic of China on July 21 for allegedly spreading superstitious, evil thinking.
áááá 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.
áááá 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.
áááá 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.
áááá 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, McWees 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.
áááá 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.
áááá 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.
áááá The attacks stopped Wednesday, he says.
áááá 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.
áááá 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.
áááá Bill Adams, a spokesperson for the Transportation Department, says the department wont answer questions or confirm what happened for security reasons.

Embassy Disavows Knowledge
Hackers also tried to break into McWees 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 Chinas Public Security Ministry.
áááá If they banned every Falun Gong site in China, why not try to block them everywhere else? McWee says. It doesnt surprise me that they would attempt to do this.
áááá 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.
áááá About so-called hacking, I have no knowledge, he says.
áááá In the eyes of Falun Gong practictioners, the Chinese government is trampling on the rights of not only its own citizens but of people in democratic societies.
áááá 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.