The Dark Visitor

Chinese hackers are targeting French Embassy websites all around the world to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit with the Dalai Lama.

According to hack4.com, featured in CNN documentary on Chinese hackers, the following French Embassy websites were successfully defaced:

法驻美国大使馆:http://www.ambafrance-us.org/
法驻英国大使馆:http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/
法驻中国大使馆:http://www.ambafrance-cn.org/（最新消息，已经恢复正常） (Repaired)
法驻加拿大使馆:http://www.ambafrance-ca.org/

Visiting all of the above websites shows that either they were not defaced or have been repaired since the attack. Hack4.com points out that the following websites have not been hit, suggesting they are future targets:

法驻日本大使馆:http://www.ambafrance-jp.org/
法驻冰岛大使馆:http://www.ambafrance-is.org/

Hack4.com’s gives this screenshot of the reported hacked website(s) (Deleted):

UPDATE: Better screenshots of the defaced French Embassy websites from 7747.net:

(Sorry guys, just updated to WordPress 2.7 and having a few problems.  Can’t seem to get the screenshot to enlarge when you click on it.  The three defaced websites are the US, UK and Canada.)

UPDATE: Once again, Eastwood has set me straight. Linked the image through the Chinese hacker website and now you should be able to pull up the graphic.

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.