By BosNewsLife Asia Service
BEIJING, CHINA (BosNewsLife)– An advocacy group with close links to Chinese house church Christians said Thursday, December 2, that two of its Websites have collapsed under cyber attacks possibly originating from China.
Chrina Aid Association (CAA) said its Chinese-language website chinaaid.net and its monitorchina.org website, which provides Chinese and English material about “religious persecution and the rule of law,” were both “inaccessible as a result of the attacks.”
CAA said “Heavy malicious traffic had repeatedly caused the website’s server, which is located in the United States, to crash. Its technical staff was still working hard late Wednesday, December 1, to restore the websites.”
The group’s “mirror English-language” site chinaaid.org, which is hosted by a different server, had so far been unaffected, the group said.
CAA acknowledged it was impossible to say definitively who was behind the attacks, but it did suggested that China was behind the latest attack on its sites.
“UNRELENTING REPORTING”
“China Aid has been unrelenting in reporting on the increased official persecution directed at religious believers, particularly house church Christians. That has been part of a wider government crackdown on dissent since the announcement in early October that the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.”
The organization posts almost daily updates on the human rights situation in China on all three of its websites.
China is known to have a vast network of hackers who are regarded by international experts as a major threat to global internet security, CAA said.
United States State Department documents released since this weekend by the whistle-blower Wikileaks group included a U.S. Embassy cable that linked China’s Politburo to a 2009 attack on Internet search giant Google’s computer systems, the group noted.
GOOGLE HACKING
The Google hacking was reportedly part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government.
They broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, according to diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks itself was under attack as it is releasing 250,000 State Department documents. A forceful internet-based attack had rendered its website inaccessible to users in U.S. and Europe, and suspicion had fallen on China again, CAA said.
CAA was founded in 2002 to draw international attention to what it describes as “China’s gross human rights violations against house church Christians.”
In addition to monitoring and reporting on alleged religious freedom violations in China, a U.S. , Midland, Texas-based organization, also says it assists “victims of religious persecution to assert their rights and works to promote the rule of law in China.”
China has as many as 130 million Christians and many of them prefer to worship outside the government approved churches, according to several church groups.
