Topic: China blocks access to WikiLeaks with The Great Firewall

[Samker]

China has reportedly blocked Internet access to the latest "massive leak" of U.S. cables by WikiLeaks.

PCWorld reports that access to the cablegate page and Chinese news articles covering the leak have been blocked since Monday. "China takes note of the government reports. We hope the U.S. side will handle the relevant issues," Hong Lei, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, said at a Beijing news conference on Tuesday. "As for the content of the documents, we will not comment on that."

The ban comes as WikiLeaks struggles to keep their site functional. The site has been under a heavy DDoS attack since Sunday. "DDOS attack now exceeding 10 gigabits a second," wrote a company official on the Wikileaks twitter account today. Wikileaks has decided to move their operation to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform. Amazon hosts a variety of big corporations' data and is headquarted in the United States. However, not all Amazons's servers are based in the U.S. and wikileaks is taking advantage of its cloud power.

China is widely known for censoring its media and western websites and services. In May this year, popular cloud storage service Dropbox was blocked by China. Google has also suffered regular blocks on its content over the past couple of years. Despite having 298 Million Internet users the country continues to block social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. China also attempted to impose further restrictions on the way its people use their computers by trying to pass legislation which would have required all personal computers sold within the country, to be shipped with software blocking access to certain websites. Fortunately the software, Green Dam Youth Escort, is only required on schools, internet cafes and other public use computers.

Wikileaks is an international non-profit organization that specialises in releasing leaked documents and information. On November 28 the site leaked 200,000 U.S. cables and documents: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/
Wikileaks plans to issue 251,287 documents in total. Western governments have condemed the leaks whilst media and journalists have been picking through the documents in detail to highlight any important information.

WikiLeaks spokesperson, Julian Assange, said in an interview with Forbes magazine that the organization's next target will be a major American bank in early 2011. "We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it," said Assange: http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/11/29/an-interview-with-wikileaks-julian-assange/2/

(NW)

[haz]

10 gigabit per second ! god this is a huge number ! maybe we should take some lessons and advices from the site admins

[Samker]

10 gigabit per second ! god this is a huge number ! maybe we should take some lessons and advices from the site admins

Usually (as I know ), server admins under DDoS, turn-off (redirect) attacker traffic (IP ranges) "before access" to Web Site.

Right now WikiLeaks "works" perfect: http://wikileaks.org/ 

 

[Samker]

Wikileaks loses Amazon home

Just yesterday, the controversial site WikiLeaks that is leaking US Government intelligence, was reported to have been a victim of Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Sunday, and that they would then move to Amazon's servers. Not even twenty-four hours later and WikiLeaks either has left or lost its host, Amazon.com.

WikiLeaks' availability to users has been spotty since the DDoS attacks on Sunday, and now for many users in the U.S. and Europe, the entire site may even appear to be down with Amazon servers refusing to acknowledge the data requests, according to the Detroit Free Press: http://www.freep.com/article/20101201/NEWS07/101201040/1322/WikiLeaks-Web-site-loses-home
The organization dedicated to making knowledge publically available, just moved to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform in response to attacks on their old servers. WikiLeaks however does have more than one hosting solution, so it may not be down for all users.

Neither WikiLeaks nor Amazon would comment on the situation still making it unclear exactly what went on between the companies, although most likely Amazon shut the door on WikiLeaks to prevent getting themselves into any hot water, even though not all of Amazon's servers are hosted in the United States.

With WikiLeaks becoming more popular and influential, the risk for attacks against opposing forces increase as well. Most recently cables were released from several embassies around the world revealing human rights violations discussed in what was thought to be a private forum. While the organization currently is focusing on governments, they will soon be moving to businesses, as reported earlier on Neowin.

The growth and potential threat to keeping any documents private causes more controversy and unrest among those at risk for having secrets exposed. With Amazon preventing WikiLeaks from being hosted on their servers, perhaps they are doing a huge favor to keeping the integrity of their business alive.

(NW)

Shame On You - Amazon! 

 

[Samker]

UPDATE:

New WikiLeaks domain & access!

http://www.wikileaks.ch/

or

http://213.251.145.96/

The DNS Company who provided the controversial Wikileaks with its domain name have decided to cut off their affiliation, effectively leaving Wikileaks with no domain name (old one - .org).

The news comes: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11907641 as last week Wikileaks published 250,000 confidential US documents, despite pleading from governments to halt the go ahead. Before the documents were published the website announced via Twitter that they were undergoing a huge DDOS attack.

On Tuesday, they were hit by yet another denial of service attack except this time with a little change from the previous. The Tuesday attack exceeded 10 Gbps while the earlier attack reached 2-4 Gbps.

At an attempt to shelter themselves from the attacks, the website took shelter with a move to Amazon’s servers. Less than twenty-hours later, Wikileaks lost its host with Amazon who replied that Wikileaks broke the policy, “You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.”

With all the issues Wikileaks are having recently, it seems the website can’t catch a break.

EveryDNS.net has said they terminated its services because of the large scale DDOS attacks but Wikileaks seem to have now switched to a Swiss webhost.

Wikileaks has informed its Twitter followers that the even without a domain, the website can be viewed by its IP address (above).To help Wikileaks a little more, numerous websites have appeared which mimic the content Wikileaks posts with some even hosting the files on their own servers.

One of the mirror sites, Wikileaks.ch (above) is being hosted on servers in France, which has sparked French Industry Minister Eric Besson to call for a ban of Wikileaks on French servers.

(NW)

[Samker]

Update:

New WikiLeaks domains & accesses!

http://wikileaks.nl/

http://wikileaks.de/

http://wikileaks.fi/