The Dark Visitor

In today’s PCWorld, Owen Fletcher provides a comprehensive summary of events surrounding the recent clash of nationalist hackers in connection with the ethnic riots in Xinjiang.  Owen was kind enough to give the blog a plug and we really appreciate that!

Searches on Friday revealed a dozen Web sites of local Chinese government offices that had been defaced with messages in support of the country’s Uighur ethnic minority group. The Uighurs, a mostly Muslim group native to Xinjiang, have complained of poor protection of their culture and a lack of economic opportunity as China has encouraged migration to Xinjiang by Han Chinese, the country’s large ethnic majority. Uighurs and Han Chinese carrying sticks and shovels hunted each other in packs during the rioting last month, which was triggered by an ethnic brawl in far-away southern China that left two Uighurs dead.

Also, props to Jumper for finding the really interesting reports on retaliations by pro-Uighur hackers.

One of the Chinese bloggers that I follow reported that Uyghur separatists have defaced a handful of Chinese .gov.cn sites.  The hacker(s) are known as “Spy HackerZ” and their handy work can be found with a simple google search for “spy hackerz” site:gov.cn.  There are eight results all from different local government sites.  The Spy Hackerz use the defacements as opportunities to voice their opinion about perceived injustices.  The sites’ admins have apparently been notified because the defacements are either removed or the sites are presently down.  I grabbed this screenshot from the ‘iron circle’ blog:

From the blog: “Any hostile attempt to split China is doomed to failure!”

Defacements on Chinese .gov websites are frequent and they are generally slow to remove the defacement. Try this google search to get an idea of the defacements out there: site:gov.cn intitle:”hacked by” –there are 1830 results at the time of this writing. Many of these defacements are on multiple pages within the same domain. Many of the defacements are opportunistic but there are a few with China specific messages as well. The Turkish hackers MadNet and GhettoTurk both left messages for China including a lot of colorful language and messages in support of Uyghurs (MadNet) or Muslims (GhettoTurk).

See also: http://www.thedarkvisitor.com/2008/04/chinese-gov-sites-pwn3d/ and http://www.thedarkvisitor.com/2009/02/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD-gov-websites-pwn%E4%B8%89d-part-%E4%BA%8C/