Hackers smash Chinese dissident Web site

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Chinese hackers took down a U.S.-based Web site that hosts dissidents' blogs over the holidays, apparently as part of a pre-Olympic propaganda campaign.

The Web site, Boxun.com, crashed Dec. 24 after a massive distributed denial of service attack, its editor, Wei Shi, told Reporters Without Borders.

"We have never before experienced such a DDOS attack, which consists of bombarding the site with an almost infinite number of connection requests," he said in a release from the group.

He said the crash was so bad that some 2000 blogs hosted on the site may have been permanently destroyed.

"We are not even sure if we will be able to recover all the data and we will have to find a new server," he said.

Reporters Without Borders officials said the Web site's service provider was closing them down.

"They have to find a new host, because the attack was so disruptive their service provider has shut them down," the group's Asia desk chief, Vincent Brossel, told security professional trade publication SC Magazine.

"They have lost a lot of data, but Wei Shi is trying to save as much as he can. It is exhausting work, and it will take him a week or two to get back up."

Reporters Without Borders was "outraged" by the attack, which "was probably organized by hackers based in China," according to the group's statement.

The group said Boxun had been hacked before. In August, 10 U.S.-based Chinese dissident Web sites, including Boxun, were temporarily shut down in a coordinated hack. It said journalists and dissidents who write for Boxun from China were "particularly targeted" by authorities there.

Other observers have said recently that China is likely to embark on a coordinated effort to shut up and shut down critics of the Communist regime there in advance of the Olympics in 2008.