Fergie's Tech Blog

Hackers Hit French Website Over China Poll

A Reuters newswire article, via The Globe and Mail, reports that:

Hackers attacked the website of a French magazine this month, attempting to sway an opinion poll on the Beijing Olympics and change the site's content, its publisher said on Wednesday.

Jean-Joel Gurviez said the website of business magazine Capital was first hit in March, when it opened a poll on whether France should boycott the Games' opening ceremony in China.

“On the first day, we had about 300 responses, which was normal for this type of poll, and they were 80 per cent in favour of a boycott. The next day there were 20,000 responses, with 80 per cent opposing a boycott,” he said.

Almost all of the responses arrived via Chinese servers, Gurviez said, leading technicians to initially think the influx was driven by Chinese sites directing patriotic fans to vote.

“But a few days later we had hackers operating off servers in China try to change our content, and there were 2.5 million attempts to access protected files. We had to shut down the site temporarily,” he said.

posted by Fergie @ 4/30/2008 06:16:00 PM