Anti Censorship Service Greatfire Hit With DDoS Attack
The website greatfire.org appears to be under a massive distributed denial of service attackthe service #39;s first, undoubtedly prompted by the mention of Greatfire in a recent Wall Street...
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An activist group working to end Chinas Internet censorship is facing an ongoing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that threatens to cripples its activities.
GreatFire.org, a censorship watchdog based within the country, reported on Thursday that it had been hit with its first ever DDoS attack.
Although its not known who is behind the attack, China has been suspected of using the tactic before to take down activist websites.
DDoS attacks work by using an army of hacked computers to send an overwhelming amount of traffic to a website, effectively disabling it.
In an Internet posting, GreatFire said that they were seeing 2.6 billion requests per hour, and that its websites had been forced offline.
We are not equipped to handle a DDoS attack of this magnitude and we need help. the group added.
The DDoS attack is targeting mirror websites GreatFire created to let Chinese users access blocked content, such as Google, BBC, the New York Times and other sites known to offer articles critical of the Chinese government.
To create the mirror websites, GreatFire has been using Amazon.com to host them through its cloud services. If the country wanted to cut access to the sites, the government would have to cause collateral damage and risk blocking Amazon servers that also support a large number of businesses, according to the group.
GreatFire suspects that the DDoS is in response to a Wall Street Journal article about the groups use of cloud services to poke holes through Chinas censorship.
Because of the number of requests we are receiving, our bandwidth costs have shot up to US$30,000 per day, the group said. Amazon, which is the service we are using, has not yet confirmed whether they will forgo this.
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Anti-censorship group in China faces DDoS attack
Whoever is behind the attack is likely not a big fan of Greatfire's services, which are designed to help Web surfers in China evade the country's censorship policies.
The website greatfire.org appears to be under a massive distributed denial of service attackthe service's first, undoubtedly prompted by the mention of Greatfire in a recent Wall Street Journal article about online censorship in China.
Greatfire, for those unaware, allows uses to look up websites and keywords to see whether they're actively being blocked or otherwise censored by the Chinese governmentThe Great Firewall, as its commonly known. The website also maintains a number of mirrors of popular websites like Google, Boxun, and microblogging website Weibo, so users can access them sans restrictions.
Part of the site's success, as described in a 2014 Bloomberg article,, lies in the fact that Greatfire hosts its mirrors using Amazon's Web Services. Everything on Amazon Web Services is encrypted, so it's impossible to tell whether requests are for legitimate sites or sites that China's censors would otherwise target for content. So, to block Greatfire's service, China would have to block Amazon Web Services in general, which would undoubtedly hack off a number of businesses and other entities using Amazon's service for legitimate means.
According to Greatfire, the DDoS attack started on Tuesday, and it's hitting the site's mirrors with around 2.6 billion requests per hour (2500 times its normal traffic).
"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," reads a Greatfire blog post.
"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."
The DDoS has allegedly bumped up Greatfire's hosting costs over at Amazon to just around $30,000 daily. It remains to be seen whether Amazon will lessen that amount as a result of the attack, or just eliminate the extra hosting cost entirely.
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Anti-Censorship Service Greatfire Hit With DDoS Attack
Googles headquarters in Beijing. Surfers in China might have found it harder to access an uncensored Google via Greatfire.org since the attack. Photograph: Sinopix/REX
An advocacy group that helps internet users inside China bypass blocks on censored content says it is suffering a denial-of-service attack disrupting its operations.
US-subsidised Greatfire.org says the attack started two days ago and traffic is 2,500 times above normal. It has affected mirror, or duplicate, websites that it has set up via encrypted web services offered by companies such as Amazon.
Greatfire.org said the attack has interfered with visitors to sites including Boxun.com, which publicises allegations of corruption and human rights abuses inside China, German provider Deutsche Welle, and Google.
The statement from a co-founder of the group, who goes by the pseudonym Charlie Smith, said its not clear who is behind the attack, but it coincides with increased pressure on the organization over the last few months and public criticism from Chinese authorities.
The Chinese government blocks thousands of websites to prevent what it deems politically sensitive information from reaching Chinese users, an effort dubbed the Great Firewall.
According to the free-expression watchdog Freedom House, since late 2013 Greatfire.org has been hosting content on domains owned by Amazon and other major companies, which officials cannot risk censoring because of their large commercial footprint within China.
Smith said the current denial-of-service attack that is flooding the mirror websites is costing the group up to $30,000 per day in bandwidth.
Greatfire.org says it gets its funding from a variety of sources, including from people and organizations inside China. The Open Technology Fund, a US-government-backed initiative to support internet freedom, says on its website it provided Greatfire.org with $114,000 in 2014.
Zhu Haiquan, spokesman of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said: As we have always stated, Chinese laws prohibit cybercrimes of all forms. The Chinese government is making great efforts to combat cybercrimes and safeguard cybersecurity. Jumping to conclusions and making unfounded accusations is not responsible and is counterproductive.
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Chinese anti-censorship group Greatfire.org suffers massive hack