Results tagged “hackers”

These statistics are mind numbing: China's new military website, http://www.mod.gov.cn, was attacked 230 million times by hackers in the first month of operation. The site, which is the government's last attempt at providing a level of transparency regarding their immensely secretive military buildup, was never successfully hacked into. If the numbers are correct, then that means over 5,000 hacks were attempted every minute: if that was just in the first month, how much do you think it's increased since then?

• Yes, we told you about it before, but we wanted to remind you: Cherie Blair, wife of former-British PM Tony Blair, will be visiting Shanghai to talk about important things on August 16. The seminar will be from 3:30pm to 5:30pm and the wine salon will be from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. 380RMB pre-order and 480RMB at the door. [Urbanatomy]
• Blogger Jenn Wong has some great pictures up of the Nike Human Race, which happened over the weekend. Over 10,000 people participated. [Our Way to Fall]
• Shanghaiist contributor Rebekah Pothaar checked out the Dali exhibit, making sure to pose hilariously next to as many Dali masterpieces as she could. [Chinatravel.net]

Thought the whole Rebiya Kadeer movie controversy was over after Chinese filmmakers pulled out of the Melbourne International Film Festival in protest? Apparently it's only gotten more ridiculous.

Most of the time when you read stories about the much reviled Chinese hacker it's in the context of some cyberattack perpetrated on some website that has stupidly dared to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. But really, what are Chinese hackers doing most of the time: well, duh, same thing everybody else is: trying to make some moolah.

Everybody's favorite portal for Chinese BBS happenings, chinaSMACK, has gone down in a Denial of Service attack suspiciously close to certain sensitive anniversaries. For those of you who don't need to deal with these kind of things, DoS attacks are when hackers flood a target's server in an attempt to keep it from functioning. Usually, it's done by either continuing to force the targeted computer to reset, or consume its resources so much that normal users are shoved out from accessing it. We don't really know how long chinaSMACK will be out of commission, or why it was brought down in the first place (though we have our suspicions - especially after reading this article), but we welcome anonymous tips to our tipline! Until we know, we'll just sit here desperately hoping it comes back soon. (Thanks Bryan!)

The poor Shanghai nightlife institution has been hit by hackers! Specifically, Muslim Turkish hackers who would really love it if you stopped Israel from being involved in wars. What do the two have to do to with each other? Probably absolutely nothing (we've heard most hackers just troll the internet looking for unsecured sites), but wouldn't it be aMuseing if there was an actual connection there?

• China says Obama should not meet the Dalai Lama [Associated Press] “China said Thursday that President Barack Obama should not meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, when he visits the United States in October. Although a meeting has not been confirmed, every president since George H.W. Bush has met the Dalai Lama, raising the ire of China, which says the Nobel Peace laureate is bent on splitting Tibet from China. "We firmly oppose the Dalai's engagement in separatist activities in any country under whatever capacity and under whatever name," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said when asked to comment on a possible meeting.”

Sure, here in China there's legitimate download sites and there's mp3.baidu.com, but if you've ever wanted to straggle the fence between legality and piracy, there's a way to do that too. Taobao has long been harboring many iTunes store gift voucher hackers, selling $200 USD (1,368 RMB) gift cards for as little as 18RMB.

Chinese hackers have "penetrated the White House computer network on multiple occasions, and obtained e-mails between government officials", said a senior US official to the Financial Times:

On each occasion, the cyber attackers accessed the White House computer system for brief periods, allowing them enough time to steal information before US computer experts patched the system.

Continue reading "US says attacks on White House, Obama and McCain networks came from China"

"A stuntman filming John Woo's new movie in Beijing was killed in a bizarre fire when a small boat rammed into the set of an ancient warship, state media said on Tuesday."

Danwei informs us that Carrefour.com.cn is currently "undergoing a website update and maintenance", but CarrefourS.com.cn is alive and hopping with nationalist messages and other "user-generated propaganda". Crazy times.

Since we broke the story on CNN's site outtage in China yesterday, the story was picked up by top US blogs such as Mashable and Gawker, although mainstream media continue to be strangely silent blissfully unaware of what happened. CNN's PR machine has since leapt into action as it seeks to explain what happened. This morning we received an email from CNN Worldwide's Director of Public Relations, Jennifer L. Martin, directing our attention to their report of yesterday's event here. In case some of you still have problems accessing the site, here it is:

CNN was targeted Thursday by attempts to interrupt its news Web site, resulting in countermeasures that caused the service to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia.

Continue reading "CNN report on its site outtage in China yesterday"