The Dark Visitor

We were pretty darn busy in April, so some things fell through the cracks and I missed this report on nationalist motivated hacking.  If you recall, during that time period, there were calls in France to boycott the Beijing Olympics over the crackdown in Tibet.  The French magazine Capital posted an online poll on whether or not France should participate in the games…Chinese hackers and nationalists were not pleased:

Capital publisher Jean-Joel Gurviez:

“On the first day, we had about 300 responses, which was normal for this type of poll, and they were 80 percent in favour of a boycott. The next day there were 20,000 responses, with 80 percent opposing a boycott,” he said.

Almost all of the responses arrived via Chinese servers, Gurviez said, leading technicians to initially think the influx was driven by Chinese sites directing patriotic fans to vote.

“But a few days later we had hackers operating off servers in China try to change our content, and there were 2.5 million attempts to access protected files. We had to shut down the site temporarily,” he said.