Attacks Target Specific Chinese Dialects

The Dark Visitor, a blog that tracks Chinese hacker activity, provides some technical details on attacks that selectively target systems based on the Chinese dialect used by web browsers. Although these types of attacks have been seen before, this is a good example of the trend toward selective targeting.

The post also provides a sample protest message sent in SQL-injection attacks:

"This is a mass invasion. Safeguard the motherland’s dignity!
F*** FRANCE! F*** CNN! I WILL ATTACK you ALWAYS !
I love my motherland!"

More Patriotic Hacking

Activists Swarm French Olympic Boycott Voting

The website of French magazine 'Capital', conducting an online poll concerning boycotting the 2008 Chinese Olympics, was flooded with votes, apparently from China.

"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 [Jean-Joel Gurviez, publisher of the website for Capital magazine] 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."

Hackers hit French magazine website over China poll