China's biggest anti-censorship service has been suffering an unprecedented denial-of-service (DDoS) attack since March 17.
Beginning on Tuesday this week, GreatFire.org and its mirror sites have been receiving up to 2.6 billion requests per hour - about 2,500 times normal levels - in a concerted attempt to overwhelm their servers and take the site down. The US-subsidized advocacy group has called the attack an "an exhibition of censorship by brute force."
The DDoS attack appears to be in retaliation for an article in the The Wall Street Journal published on Monday that detailed FreeWeibo's mirroring system and may have pointed out potential attack points to Chinese censors. GreatFire have provided the following background on their website:
- This attack affects all of our mirror websites. While we have talked openly about our method of using collateral freedom to unblock websites and mobile apps that have been blocked by the Chinese authorities, the WSJ story clearly stated how the strategy works and how it is being used successfully to deliver uncensored content into China. Blocked websites that we have liberated in China include Boxun, Deutsche Welle and Google.
- We don’t know who is behind this attack. However, the attack coincides with increased pressure on our organization over the last few months. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) publicly called us “an anti-China website set up by an overseas anti-China organization”. We also know that CAC has put pressure on our IT partners to stop working with us. Recently, we noticed that somebody was trying to impersonate us to intercept our encrypted email.
- Last week, Reporters Without Borders, an NGO based in Paris, used our open source method of collateral freedom to unblock nine websites around the world, including two of importance to China: Mingjing News and The Tibet Post.
Due to the number of requests, GreatFire is now facing bandwith costs of USD30,000 per day from service provider Amazon, although it's currently unclear whether or not Amazon will waive these fees in light of the attack.
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