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SCMP Reporter

Mass organised hacking activities against United States Web sites might have stopped, but anti-American sentiment will probably linger among China's hacking community.

That is according to Hackers of China (HOC) president, who uses the pseudonym 'Gao Jianfei'.

'We stopped hacking activities against the Americans, but in the future, we will rise up against any one who dares to threaten our sovereignty,' Mr Gao said.

Hacker groups in China have called for a ceasefire in the 'cyber war' that started after the death of Chinese pilot Wang Wei in the collision involving a US spy plane and Chinese fighter jet on April 1.

US hackers launched hostilities against Chinese Web servers after China detained the spy plane's crew and mainland hackers lashed out starting on Labour Day.

Breaking into mainland servers, the US hackers left taunts and frequently racist remarks on the Web sites. In response, Chinese hackers - among them HOC - launched a hacking blitz, and continued to do so until May 7, the second anniversary of the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. An American hacker who uses the pseudonym Hacker Jak, said: 'The whole thing started because we wanted to get their attention and we won't stop until the groups cease to exist and we humiliate them.'

A member of the Hackweiser group - which has defaced numerous corporate and Government Web sites on the mainland - Hacker Jak said the racist remarks were left on sites to get the Chinese to respond.

And they did, breaking into servers of the US Department of Health, Department of Labour, a naval computer and telecommunications station plus minor government and commercial Web sites. Mr Gao, who works in information technology in Beijing, and claims to be one of the leaders in the Chinese movement, said: 'I am very angry. As a Chinese, I will not let anyone do this to my country.'

He refused to reveal his real name 'for security reasons'.

HOC is one of the most active, albeit smaller and recent groups. Others are The Honkers Union of China, Red Hackers and China Tianyu.

Chinese activity hit a high on midnight of Youth Day, May 4 - also the anniversary of the 1919, nationalism movement - when pro-Chinese as well as Chinese hackers launched an attack on the whitehouse.gov domain. Although the hackers failed to crack into the servers, the denial-of-service attacks overloaded the site with a flood of data and surfers were blocked from gaining access to any file on the servers.

The White House confirmed the outage caused the Web site to be shut down for two hours that day.

Mr Gao, admitting most of his group - which he claims has 5,000 members - were new converts to hacking, said HOC hacked about 200 Web sites last week.

The Honkers Union of China, claimed its members had collectively defaced more than 1,000 US Web sites.

Although it is impossible to ascertain the number of sites that have been hacked on both sides, some sites reported hundreds of defacements of Web sites ending with China's 'cn' domain since April 1.

Defacing Web sites has seemed to be a game for many online vandals, but data about the efforts of Chinese hackers has been hard to find. This is not because of a lack of incidents, but because Chinese hackers do not report defacements to sites that track such attacks.

Mr Gao said he had been involved in campaigns against Taiwan and Japan, and he had been hacking for 'several years'. 'Most of us are students who are not happy with the US government,' said Mr Gao, adding most of them were aged 18 to 20.

Mr Gao said the US plane had encroached on Chinese territory and the US had not apologised to the Chinese, and US hackers had hacked into Chinese Web sites.

'This is a sign of American imperialism. Every Chinese who has any sense would not just sit there and watch this happen. And those of us who are capable of doing anything should do all we can,' he said.

Site.com, Page 6



Hackers vow to protect 'sovereignty'