An advocacy group that helps internet users in China get around online censorship has warned that Beijing is launching an unprecedented campaign against web freedom after it suffered a major cyber-attack.
Greatfire.org, a group which tracks banned sites in China and offers solutions to get around the ‘Great Fire Wall’, announced last night that a mysterious attack had caused traffic to surge by 2,500 times since Tuesday.
“We don’t know who is behind the attack,” the statement said. “However, the attack coincides with increased pressure on our organization over the last few months.”
In January, the Cyberspace Administration of China labeled Great Fire.org an “anti-China website”, and in recent months the group reported someone was trying to impersonate them to intercept encrypted emails.
“None of us have seen such an intense crackdown as is going on now [in China],” Charlie Smith, an alias for a co-founder of Great Fire.org, told ucanews.com.
Since January, when it was reported that the Great Fire Wall was upgraded, a number of virtual proxy networks (VPNs) announced they were having problems offering services in China that route web searches through foreign servers to unblock censored websites.
China’s online crackdown extended to Reuters on Friday which became the latest news agency to fall foul of the Great Fire Wall following recent blocks against the Wall Street Journal, and earlier the New York Times and Bloomberg.
“Reuters is committed to practicing fair and accurate journalism worldwide. We recognize the great importance of news about China to all our customers, and we hope that our sites will be restored in China soon,” it said in a statement.
Although it wasn’t immediately clear why Reuters was targeted, China’s main target in recent months has appeared to be organizations involved in a new online technique called “collateral freedom” designed to provide access to blocked sites.
Great Fire.org, the pioneer of the technique, has offered mirror sites of blocked content on the cloud servers of major multinationals in the hope that Chinese authorities will consider them too big and important to block, a tactic also recently employed by Reporters without Borders (RSF).
Blocking the servers of companies like Amazon and Google to get at groups like Great Fire.org and RSF would mean depriving people and companies of essential services.
“The economic and political cost would be too high,” RSF said on their website.
But Great Fire.org must now wait to see whether Amazon, its cloud host, will waive the additional US$30,000 per day the cyber-attack has cost in increased traffic.
“If they do not forego this, this will put a significant squeeze on our operations,” Great Fire.org said.
Amazon representatives in China were not available for comment on Friday and the company is yet to speak publicly about the cyber-attack.
Although Great Fire.org has struggled to cope, Smith said it was surviving and pointed out that the attack showed that collateral freedom was working.
“If the Chinese authorities are involved in this attack, then they have shown that they are not willing to shut China off from the global internet,” he said. “That is very good news.”