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Chinese Military Web Site Battered With Attempted Cyber-Attacks

by Caleb Johnson on November 20, 2009 at 08:40 AM


When China launched a Web site for its defense ministry in August, the whole world took notice. With both English and Chinese versions, the government hoped the site would prove it was serious about being more transparent when it came to the military. However, this attempt also attracted hackers.

According to BBC News, there have been about 2.3 million cyber-attacks on the site in its first month of operation alone. We thought Twitter was bombarded with a ridiculous number of attacks, but that's just a flat-out, mind-boggling number. There are no reports that any military information was compromised, but it seems that hackers aren't the only truth-seekers visiting the site. The site's editor, Ji Guilin, told the state-run newspaper that 1.25 billion people -- many from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Singapore, and Japan -- have visited the site to search topics like "military photos," "top military leaders," "high-level events," and "military power."

This can't be comforting news for the Chinese government, which is notorious for limiting its citizens' Web access. We can only hope that China won't step back from free-flowing information and shut down the site as a result of the attacks. Our more rational minds, though, are pretty sure that once a hacker successfully cracks the site (and one will), it will get yanked faster than an Olympic gymnast on her 16th birthday. [From: BBC News and Al Jazeera]

Tags: china, defense military, DefenseMilitary, hack, hackers, military, security, web

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