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Anonymous Steps Up Hacking Attempts on Chinese Websites

By Andy Sim - on 9 Apr 2012, 10:18am

Anonymous Steps Up Hacking Attempts on Chinese Websites

Image credit: Associated Press

Anonymous, the international "hacktivist" group growing in notoriety for their online retaliations against anti-piracy campaigns, has spawned an establishment in mainland China simply named as Anonymous China. The Chinese hackers claimed to have hacked into 300 Chinese websites last week, although most of the hacked sites were operating normally as of Friday last week (April 6th). Some of the downed sites were still crippled by error messages, and among them is an official site for the ruling Communist Party in the southern city of Hezhou.

Anonymous China first made their presence known via Twitter last month. In a letter to AFP (Agence France-Presse), the group stated that it would continue to target Chinese sites and they would "keep on going". Besides their hacking efforts, Anonymous China has delivered messages to the Chinese government and its people as well. Appearing on one of the affected sites is this message, and here's a snippet of it: "Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall." According to The Telegraphs' report, the hacking attempts surfaced after the Chinese government launched a series of arrests and "punished" two micro-blogs when rumors of a coup related to a politician's major scandal broke. 

On the other side of the globe, the British arm of Anonymous has been busy as well. The Downing Street website was disrupted over the weekend by hackers who targeted the Home Office in protest of the British government’s extradition policies. And like their Chinese counterparts, Anonymous has vowed to target British government sites each week by overloading them with traffic to render them offline. 

Source: The Telegraph (1) (2)

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