Category Archives: Hong Kong

#IMWeekly: June 20, 2014

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Hong Kong
On the eve of a referendum about voting rights this week, Hong Kong’s digital voting platform was hit by a massive DDoS attack. Today is the first of three days of voting for Hong Kong citizens, who will decide whether to offer universal suffrage, seen as a move that would weaken the influence of Beijing-sponsored candidates. Now in its fourth day, the DDoS attack is being called “one of the largest and most persistent DDoS attacks in the history of the Internet” by the company CloudFlare, which has been contracted to defend the voting platform and said that the attack reached a scale of 300Gb per second today. The attack is widely suspected to be the work of pro-Beijing groups, who oppose the referendum. The vote is unofficial, meaning that its results will have “no legal effect,” according to a statement by the Hong Kong government. More than 200,000 ballots have already been cast. For more information, see our earlier post on the attacks.

Iraq
The spiraling violence as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sweeps across Iraq prompted the Maliki government to cut Internet access in the country. Last Friday, sites including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were blocked across the nation. Two days later, the government issued orders to ISPs to shut down all Internet access in five of the country’s 19 provinces. The Atlantic reported this week that ISIS is particularly effective at using “gaming Twitter” to push its message and recruit new followers. More information can be found in our blog post about the shutdown.

Pakistan
Twitter announced that it would no longer censor tweets deemed “blasphemous” by the government. In a statement, the company said that it had “re-examined the requests and, in the absence of additional clarifying information from Pakistani authorities, [had] determined that restoration of the previously withheld content is warranted.” Though hailed as a victory for freedom of expression in Pakistan, the decision drew attention to Twitter’s murky takedown policy, which it has declined to make public.

Tajikistan
Reporters Without Borders reported that YouTube has been blocked and Google is only partly accessible in Tajikistan since June 12. Blocking has surged in the country over the last two years, usually around times of political tension like last November’s presidential election. On Monday, a Global Voices contributor and the publication’s former Central Asia Editor, Tajik-born Alex Sodiqov, was detained while conducting academic research in the eastern part of the country. The government has allegedly shown him on national television “in an apparent attempt to discredit both him and an opposition politician.” More information can be found in our earlier blog post on Sodiqov’s detainment.

United Kingdom
Revelations emerged this week that the British government has been using a legal loophole to scrutinize its citizens’ social media communications. Charles Farr, director general of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, revealed that posts and other communications made on platforms like Facebook and Twitter are considered “external communications” because they’re routed through foreign companies. This means that even missives traded by British nationals in the UK, who are usually afforded significant privacy protections, are fair game for government interception—without a warrant—because the data leaves British shores before reentering.

#imweekly is a weekly round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

DDoS Attacks in Hong Kong Target Pro-Democracy Websites

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Between Friday, June 13, and Wednesday, June 18, Hong Kong suffered two DDoS attacks aimed at pro-democracy sites.

The targets—one, the site of civil society group “Occupy Central with Love and Peace”, the other newspaper Apple Daily—both seek to advocate for universal suffrage in Hong Kong.

Since 1997, when Hong Kong’s period under British control ended and the city-state came under Chinese rule, many of its top officials have been elected by a small group of Beijing loyalists. Occupy Central advocates for a civil referendum that would shift voting power away from these Beijing loyalists and to Hong Kong’s citizenry, allowing them the right to vote in elections that determine who will be Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. Recently, Occupy Central, with the help of Hong Kong University’s Public Opinion Programme (HKUPOP), planned to run an online public opinion poll between June 20 and 22 to vote on a referendum on constitutional reforms.

Google’s Digital Attack Map, June 10, via Global Voices Advocacy.

Occupy Central’s three web hosting services suffered violent DDoS attacks; due to the fallout of the incident, only one of these services, Cloudflare, still supports the voting system. As a proposed workaround to the voting system’s susceptibility to attacks, Hong Kong University’s Public Opinion Program is now considering using telephone lines instead, a weak alternative to the online platform.

Google’s Digital Attack Map, June 14, via Global Voices Advocacy.

The second target of the attacks, Next Media’s Apple Daily, is an independent Hong Kong newspaper often critical of Beijing. Its founder, Jimmy Lai, is a vocal supporter of Occupy Central. Apple Daily has encouraged its readers to vote on Occupy Central’s referendum.

The attacks were separately orchestrated. That said, Next Media chairman Jimmy Lai suspects that mainland Chinese hackers, eager to suppress Hong Kong’s emerging democratic impulses, wanted to silence two of the city’s most audibly pro-democracy voices through these attacks.

The attacks aren’t limited to Apple Daily and Occupy; they come in a long line of incidents in which pro-Beijing forces, working online, have tried to suppress groups within Hong Kong that are working toward greater democracy. In anticipation of the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989—an anniversary that sparked wide censorship across mainland China—the website of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic movements was also taken offline by sustained DDoS attacks.  In October 2013, Global Voices Advocacy anticipated that malicious hacking of civic groups and activist communications like those of Occupy Central would surge approaching July. A similar DDoS attack occurred on HKUPOP’s servers in March 2012, shortly after HKUPOP held mock elections for the city’s Chief Executive.

Occupy Central and Apple Daily’s founders both feel that Beijing loyalists are undoubtedly behind the attacks, given the subversive, pro-democratic nature of both sites in the wake of increasing tensions between Hong Kong’s pro-democracy supporters and the mainland Chinese government. That said, no particular hacking forces have come forward and taken responsibility for the attacks.