Chinese dissident site hacked again

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- A U.S.-based Web site that hosts Chinese dissidents' blogs is being hacked again, days after an attack took it offline and nearly destroyed its archives.

The Web site, Boxun.com, which hosts some 2000 blogs, was the target of a "very strong" distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack last week, its editor, Watson Meng, told United Press International.

He added that hackers probing the Web sites of several U.S. government agencies had "spoofed" or forged their Internet addresses to make it seem as if the probes came from his site.

"Our service provider received complaints from a number of government agencies," he said.

He said last week's attack, which lasted several hours, bombarded the Boxun servers with fake data requests at an average of 70 MB per second. "It really slowed us down," he said.

Boxun crashed altogether Dec. 24 after a massive DDOS strike and was only just up and running again when it was attacked again last week.

"The last couple of months we have been receiving these attacks every week or so," Meng said, adding that the Web site had been forced to find a new server host that was better able to handle the constant stream of attacks.

The non-profit Reporters Without Borders says Boxun is one of a number of Web sites carrying uncensored news and information about China that had been recently attacked "probably … by hackers based in China," according to a statement. 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 Summer Olympics.

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Shaun Waterman, UPI Homeland and National Security Editor