Supporting Ai Weiwei, Change.org Falls Victim to Chinese Hackers

Activism website Change.org has been hit by a DDoS attack after running an online petition calling for the release of detained Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. At the time of writing the site appears back online, but is still experiencing intermittent outages.

On the Change.org blog, the website’s founder explains he “[does] not know the reason or exact source of these attacks” but that the attacks come “from locations in China.”

So while it can’t be proven that it was a politically motivated attack by individuals in China, it certainly looks to be the case. Security expert Bruce Schneier has touched upon this sort of thing in the past:

There certainly is a lot of hacking coming out of China. Any company that does security monitoring sees it all the time. Of course, they can’t prove that it comes out of China. But the majority of servers used in the attacks are located in China, using DNS bouncers that can only be registered by people literate in Chinese. The hacker websites where different hackers and hacker groups brag about their exploits and sell hacker tools and how-to videos are written in Chinese. Technically, it’s possible all the attackers are from, say, Canada and trying to disguise themselves, but it seems pretty unlikely.

Since his detainment, we’ve written about some of the online international support online for Ai Weiwei. Change.org’s petition is only one of many targets that nationalist Chinese hackers would likely take issue with.

Many other people and organizations have been targetted over recent years, ranging from the Dalai Lama to Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine to foreign correspondents. Just last month Chinese hackers were also suspected in an attack on the Australian Prime Minister’s computer as well as a DDos attack on WordPress.com.

But Chinese hackers, like any group, cannot all be painted with the same political brush. While many assume they’re all doing the bidding of their government, hackers appear to be causing problems for Beijing too.

It’s interesting to note that Chinese government websites have experienced a dramatic rise in attacks that appear to originate from both home and abroad.