Beacons of freedom: The changing face of Anonymous

December 3rd, 2012

Online irreverent political protest is here to stay. But, asks Gabriella Coleman, what will be the legacy for digital freedom? (more…)

Vietnam: Pro-democracy website hacked

August 22nd, 2011

Hackers launched a sustained attack against pro-democracy website Viet Tan on 13 August in a denial-of-service (DDoS) operation. Of the 77,000 IP addresses employed, 73 per cent originated from Vietnam. The Hanoi government’s firewall on www.viettan.org was lifted so that the network relying on computers from the country could take down the site. Viet Tan has been constantly blocked by Vietnamese censors, with web users in the country requiring proxies or other circumvention tools to access the site.

South Korea: Plans to scrap real-name system

August 12th, 2011

South Korea‘s government will go ahead with plans to scrap the current real-name system for internet users in the wake of the country’s worst online security breach. Last month, personal information including names, mobile phone numbers and email addresses of about 35 million users of the country’s popular internet and social media sites Nate and Cyworld was stolen in a hacking attack. The real-name system, introduced in 2007, requires people to use their real names and resident registration numbers when making online postings on websites with more than 100,000 visitors per day.

Malaysia: Sites brought down by cyber-attacks

April 18th, 2011

On 15 April, a number of opposition and news websites were subject to attacks by hackers causing them to crash. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack came in the run-up to elections in Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak. An online Malaysian news portal, Malaysiakini, was forced to get its news stories out via Facebook, WordPress and other free websites.

China: Google email services disrupted

March 21st, 2011

Google has blamed the Chinese government for disrupting its services after users experienced problems with accessing their emails.  Some users have also claimed that their email accounts have been hacked into. Just over two weeks ago some Chinese Google email users were targets of hacking attempts that were described by Google as politically motivated, specifically aimed at activists.

Jordan: Top news site disabled by hackers

February 9th, 2011

Jordan’s most visited news website, Ammonnews, was frozen by hackers for several hours on Monday. The cyber attack came a day after the website had published a statement critical of the government by representatives of 36 major tribes. The website’s chief editor Basel Okoor blamed state intelligence services for the disruption saying, “Only the Jordanian security services have the technical capacity to do this”. Government officials dismissed the charges and maintained that they had no hand in disabling the website.

Anonymous member jailed over Scientology cyber attacks

May 26th, 2010

Brian Mettenbrink of Nebraska was sentenced this week to one year in prison and a $20,000 fine for orchestrating the DDoS attacks against the Church of Scientology’s website in 2008. Mettenbrink admitted to being a member of the group Anonymous, who staged a series of online attacks on Scientology websites as a protest over the religion’s censorship of the internet.

Google detects politically motivated malware attacks in Vietnam

April 1st, 2010

Google’s Security blog has revealed that a number of malicious malware attacks on Vietnamese computers have been specifically designed to spy on and target “blogs containing messages of political dissent”. Google described this example of internet hacktivism as a direct attempt to “squelch opposition” to a Chinese-backed bauxite mining project in Vietnam which has divided public opinion.