The recent online tit-for-tat between Chinese and US hackers was triggered by a US spy plane bumped into a Chinese fighter jet on April 1. Soon after the mid air collision, the US hackers launched over 100 assaults a day against Chinese websites. By the end of April over 600 Chinese websites, including many in Taiwan, had come under fire or totally broken down.
Facing the challenge as an attack from “American hackers to smash all Chinese servers”, the Chinese side immediately took up the fight. Many hackers’ organizations known as China Honkers Union and Hackers Union of China promptly responded in an all-out cyber war against their US counterparts on May 1 to 7.
To no small extent had the White House and Pentagon been alarmed over Chinese Honkers’ attack and all US networks had even been alerted by the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) on April 27 to be on guard and adopt countermeasures as a way out.
The fact was that by 10pm May 1, 92 sites were under attacks of Chinese Honkers, including the Energy Committee and state Secretary of California. At 10pm May 4, White House’s official site was crippled. On the morning of May 5, over 1,400 US sites were blackened, far more than those crippled in China.
Instead of carrying out fight single-handedly as they had once done, the Chinese Honkers took their US counterparts in coordinated attacks, surprising most American Internet experts.
Chinese Honkers chiefly targeted their attacks at commercial sites (.coms), spared most .govs and .orgs, and didn’t touch .edus. Their attacks were also limited to defacing web pages. Members of Honkers were not allowed to attack individual users and lawful sites, otherwise they would be expelled from the Honkers’ rank.
In contrast, US hackers followed no principles and attacked at random, targeting many sites of education departments. Besides, Chinese hackers took to no verbal attacks or filthy words while most of their American counterparts left obscenity-laden anti-Chinese statements.
Some 80,000 people had been involved in the hackers’ war. As war escalated many people called for a halt to the insanity of the war as it risked network security and had caused untold damages to both countries.
(People’s Daily 05/16/2001)
