GreatFire.org under massive DDoS siege – calls for help from the web

20 Mar 2015

GreatFire.org, the service that seeks to counter the censorship of Chinese websites, is under a massive sustained distributed denial of service DDoS) attack that has sent its bandwidth costs soaring to US$30,000 per day.

The service says it is being hit by an attack that is sending 2.6bn requests per hour to its servers.

“We are under attack and we need help,” GreatFire.org implored.

Websites are not equipped to handle this level of attack and usually break and go offline.

The level of traffic to GreatFire.org has increased 2,500pc above normal levels.

The Great Firewall of China has teeth

GreatFire says that the attack is possibly in response to an article in the Wall Street Journal about Chinese censorship of the web.

It says the attack coincides with increased pressure on GreatFire. In recent months the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) publicly labelled GreatFire “an anti-China website.”

GreatFire said: “Recently, we noticed that somebody was trying to impersonate us to intercept our encrypted email.

“Last week, Reporters Without Borders, an NGO based in Paris, used our open source method of collateral freedom to unblock nine websites around the world, including two of importance to China: Minjing News and the Tibet Post.”

The DDOS attack on GreatFire has sent its bandwidth costs spiralling to US$30,000 per day and it has asked Amazon, which hosts its data, to forego these costs.

Great Firewall of China image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com