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Tibetan Exiles Hit With DDoS
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-08-18
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After reports of a wireless mesh network serving Tibetan refugee camps emerged online, a heavy attack hit the Tibetan Technology Center website.
 | | Monkeys Among Problems with Exile Wireless Network |  |
Writer Xeni Jardin's travels through Asia have been documented on her site as well as through reports she has filed with Wired News. One report from Dharamshala, India, discussed a community of exiles living across the border from Chinese-occupied Tibet.
The community has been receiving assistance from volunteers to construct a wireless mesh network. Once it is fully operational, the network will provide an inexpensive way for those in the community to access the Internet and VoIP telephony.
The project also has to deal with a problem that most sysadmins never see: monkeys breaking WiFi antennas. Jardin noted that Yahel Ben-David, founder of the Dharamsala Wireless Mesh, may be building one of the only networks in the world that required monkey-proofing.
But while Ben-David and the project have added stronger materials to the construction of the physical network, threats from the online world are not so easily handled.
In a follow-up report, Jardin wrote that the day after her story was published, the website for the Tibetan Technology Center had to fend off a distributed denial of service attack:
"There was no immediately evident single source for the attack, but it started right after an extensive series of China-based scans," said Ben-David.
"It was definitely malicious, because this was not the behavior of a human user or cluster of human users," Ben-David added. "It was robot behavior -- reloading the same URLs again and again, to access every possible piece of data in the database."
The attacks appeared to come from IP addresses of locations on different parts of the globe. That plus the high level of activity would be indicative of a DDoS, with bots activated by a remote attacker. As of today the site could be accessed normally.
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Tags: China, Tibet
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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