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.
