Boxun.com Falls Prey to DDoS Attack

A news website of China based in the US is undergoing a tough phase. According to the reports, the website confronted a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) bombardment, which resulted in a massive crash of Boxun.com/blogs on December 24, 2007. The Chinese website is now trying to reactivate and reconstruct its blogs after it has experienced the huge crash.

As per Vincent Brossel, the Head of Chinese desk for Reporters Without Borders, the massive DDoS attack has smashed the database of posting completely and also have compelled the editor of Boxun.com Wei Shi to search for a new service provider in order to host outlets.

Paris-based Vincent Brossel told SCMagazineUS that Boxun would soon have to search for a new host provider as the disruptive attacks have forced them to shut down. Brossel further explained that the crash has resulted into a massive loss of stored data and the editor Wei Shi is constantly trying to retrieve as much data as possible. The retrieving of data, added Brossel, is a tedious process, which might take a couple of weeks. SCMagazineUS published it in news on December 28, 2007.

The editor of Boxun.com cautioned Reporters Without Borders in the fourth week of December 2007 that near about 2,000 blogs hosted on Boxun.com were destroyed due to infinite number of requests were made on the site for connection. That resulted in crash of the blog site completely on December 24, 2007.

Wei Shi said also told Reporters Without Borders that that they have never seen such a massive DDoS attack that bombarded the website with infinite volume of requests for connection, according to news reported by Middle East Times on December 31, 2007.

Though suffered with small hacking attacks before, the Boxun.com was considered as a major blog site comprising around 1,000 blogs which are "highly active" and where Chinese were permitted to post comments on various environmental issues, human rights and many other social issues, as per Brossel.

Boxun in among those information sites that are blocked frequently by the government firewalls in China and hence, users are increasingly evading with 'tunnel' software or proxy servers.

Reporters Without Borders has expressed its anger on this matter on a dissident site of China.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/17/2008