[Clearwisdom.net] New York, December 21, 2000 (Falun Dafa Information Center)
People who persecute Falun Gong in China are sending computer viruses to Falun Gong practitioners in the US, attempting to break the communication between theFalun Gong practitioners.
On the 19th, the computer of Wang Cheng, the webmaster of www.falundafa.org, was attacked by a virus in a Chinese email. The email message said: [slandering phrase against Falun Gong]. The webmaster said his computer detected the virus but was unable to repair it before it infected the hard drive and completely disabled his computer. This kind of 'wscript.kakworm' virus is particularly insidious and disruptive because it automatically activates when an email is read instead of working through an attached file. The virus will also infiltrate the email address book and send itself to everyone on the contact list.
Since Jiang Zemin's government started the crackdown on Falun Gong in July 1999, not only the practitioners in Mainland China have encountered severe persecution; also the overseas practitioners are often harassed by Jiang Zemin's cyber police. The Falun Dafa websites are often attacked using advanced techniques employed by hackers against larger corporate sites, and the source of the attacks can usually be traced back to the P.R.C. Public Security Bureau or companies in China.
Wang Cheng is a senior computer sys-admin. He said, "I am a Falun Gong practitioner helping to maintain a Falun Dafa web site. Like other webmasters of Falun Dafa, several practitioners and I volunteered to maintain a web site that provides Falun Dafa information and learning materials."
Since the crackdown of Falun Gong in July 1999, hackers, almost all of them from Mainland China, often attack Wang's web site, his personal computer, and his email box. Wang said, "When we trace back to the source of the troublemakers, we found that some were from different web sites in China, some were from the Chinese Postal Bureau web site, and some were from the Public Security Bureau in Beijing, etc." He said, "The following are their primary hacking tactics:
- Denial of Service
- Hacking the web site
- Attacking other web sites by forging the IP addresses of Dafa web sites.
- Email bombing. This is often used.
- Emailing viruses.
This tactic uses one or several computers to fetch information from our web sites repeatedly and rapidly, causing our web sites to go down, preventing people from browsing it. In the US, hackers had attacked yahoo.com, amazon.com and other sites using this method. The troublemakers have been punished according to law.
A Falun Dafa web site in Europe was hacked and articles from the People's Daily, which slander Falun Gong, had their contents replaced and altered.
Shortly after China started persecuting Falun Gong, one day I received a phone call from the US Department of Transportation, telling me that my web site's computer was attacking theirs. When I called back, a DOT staff told me that they knew it was someone else causing trouble, because the IP addresses of other computers that attacked their computers also were related to Falun Dafa web sites. Later, investigations showed that the real attacker was actually the Public Security Bureau in Beijing.
Many Falun Dafa webmasters have been attacked this way. Thousands of messages jammed their email boxes within a short period of time, which made them unable to access their email and affected their computers. All of the contents of these 'bombs' are Chinese articles that slander Falun Gong.
Lately many Dafa webmasters have received emails infected with different viruses. Some viruses activate through attached files; others automatically activate when the email is read. Some viruses re-send the materials in the computer to a designated place of the hacker; some erase everything in the hard drive. I am one of their victims. Yesterday I got an email infected by a virus with the subject title of [slandering phrase against Falun Gong], which downed my computer for two days."
"Hacking" is a criminal offense in Europe and the US. There were people sentenced to jail for hacking the government and lager corporate networks.
