SlideShare, a Mountain View-based startup that lets you upload and embed PowerPoint presentations on the web, appears to have stirred the red dragon last week.
About ten days ago the company began receiving anonymous requests to delete slideshows that were deemed “illegal” by the requesters. The SlideShare staff checked out these slideshows and discovered them to be quite innocent. While some described ways to fight corruption in China, none of them violated the company’s terms of service, and so SlideShow did nothing to fulfill the requests.
SlideShare soon began receiving a different type of request from the same people, who could now be identified by their email addresses. This time they were pretending to be users who had lost their passwords. Once again doing nothing, the company got a very demanding, and almost threatening, call to its Indian office on Wednesday, one that insisted that the company grant access to an account.
After these three failed attempts, SlideShare experienced a massive distributed denial of service attack starting at 10pm on Thursday, one day before the CNN website was attacked by Chinese instigators in apparent backlash to its coverage of the Tibetan protests. We’ve been told that the attack reached a peak of 2.5GB/sec and consisted entirely of packets sent from China.
Not long after the first attack subsided, SlideShare was hit a second time on Friday and the site went down again until Saturday morning. Since then there have been no more attacks, but the company continues to receive fake password recovery and illegitimate takedown requests at a rate of about 5-10 per day (it has accumulated about 50-60 total).
There’s a lot of speculation around just what has happened here since no one knows for sure who is behind the requests and attacks. However, it seems likely that they were from the same hacker groups - possibly linked to the Chinese government - that attacked the CNN site (and later called their attack off after getting too much publicity). Some of the slideshows with takedown requests have been viewed many times recently, so their popularity seems to have landed them on the Chinese government’s radar.
SlideShare insists that it will do everything it can to protect its users’ freedom of speech. As such, it has no plans to remove any of the content in question.
The Sports Network was also recently taken over by Chinese hackers who mistook it for CNN sports.
Update: Just as I finished writing this post, I received word from the company that a third attack had begun.
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their site went down?? must be amateur hour again.
time to fire the chief architect, etcetera.
If it was truly a denial of service attack to the magnitude of 2.5gpbs then how is that an architectural problem? They may have the right amount of servers and bandwidth and just didn’t see a need to cater for a denial of service attack, since it is exactly legal.
then… surely, we take the offending material and place it on other sites?
DDOS attacks are mean comment {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/UiI8eVrpjx_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”DDOS attacks are mean comment ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/fPvQjqzEUF”}}}
All I am going to say is that. Finally, finally we have an example of a company that is more interested in the rights and benefits of its customers, than its own interests. Just for that SlideShare should receive a lot of media exposure and be used as an example to other companies - CrapCast .. I mean, Comcast.
I really wonder if the Chinese government would be interested in this petty hooliganism! Can this be some actions performed by special interest groups to make China look bad in the wake of the Olympics?
There is a lot of this”Let’s bash China!” going on around the world!
Japanese government is blaming China for contaminated food, because one shipment of Gyoza had a problem. A person died after eating it. Now Japanese gorvernment is running a national campaign advacating how bad Chinese food is. Are the trying to protect Japanese consumers or Japanese manufacturers and farmers!
Need to take The Anti-China rage with a grain of salt!
So, who has links to these “illegal” slideshows?
If China fell off the internet, we’d lose World of Warcraft gold farmers, Spammers, and totalitarian government sponsored DDOS’s against free speech.
Dear China, FUCK YOU.
Angry, why are you Angry?
Careful there, Angry Techie… we don’t want TechCrunch getting hit because of your angry words.
The Chinese are watching… Waiting…
Mark, how about an article telling use what we can do to fight these attacks, or prepare for them if even possible.
This is how China tells the world it’s going to respond to concerns about their genocide against tibet? Attacking American businesses? How about we go down to the landing stations where the trans-pacific submarine cables go from China to LA and cut them with an axe. China’s economy would be devastated from the loss of Spam and WoW gold-farming revenue.
Nobosh, it helps to be on a hosting service that has the right engineers to deal with this problem. If you have your own server, you need to have the human resources or the technical knowledge yourself to combat attacks.
Angry are you a CIA operative..:)
For a distributed denial of service attack, you would need to block very large ranges of IP addresses at your firewall level.
Given that they say it’s all from China, if I were them I would just block every known range belonging to China. Screw em.
If it were distributed in a larger manner (multiple countries), your next best shot is at having the resources to handle such an attack. This would include MANY gigabyte connections, a very large cluster of servers, etc.
If every website had a network setup big enough to handle the magnitude of a well constructed denial of service attack, we would all be out of business from the cost of doing so.
If I were a CIA operative I’d be a drunk staring at identical satellite photos all day wondering why our intelligence system keeps failing us.
@10 that’s what they want. Now-a-days organizations and people rely on others’ fears to control them and not provide opposition. So if you want to be someone’s bitch, keep quiet and empower them through your fears.
Angry, are you initiating Defcon 1? I better go hide under my computer..:)
@17 I am just making a joke at this whole scare tactic China is trying to impose. Lighten up.
@18 you are just trying to stir up trouble. Can’t believe someone would dedicate a website and his / her life to “trolling” boards and getting banned.
I know you are, but that doesn’t mean that that’s not a widely utilized tactic.
Wow, I see some real Human Rights Activist here! Anyone willing to strap Little Boy around them and parachute over Beijing?
#20 No, I am trying to shine some light on the ignorance!
@23 show us some real information which isn’t sponsored by the Chinese government which suggests, with substantial evidence, that China has nothing to do with the drama going on in Tibet.
Anthony, I am not condoning China and its Human Rights abuses. This is a complected issue that the whole world is trying to address!
Many governments have problems. Just look at USA under Bush!
Now is TechCrunch the right place to escalate such a discussion?
(L)China and go home
If your going to abuse human rights, at least have a great PR campaign. America has it, seems China failed for the most part.
It sort of makes me miss the KGB days of Soviet Union!
Can you imagine TechCrunch around that time..:)
We probably would have started World War Three!
Anthony, I see we come to agreement there..:)
@31 our only agreement is that we both agree China is not the only advocate for abusing human rights. I won’t agree with any of your other statements.
I angry with angry techie. FUCK CHINA.
Its one thing if you deny free speech to your own people, quite another when you try to tell americans what to do.
Retards can’t even build decent cheap crap. Commie shitheads.
#28 China is slow learners. They are still old economy. Remember it is Al Gore that invented the Internet not Mao Zedong!
SlideShare taking a stand for freedom of speech. Hear that Google ?
Wow, Macarthurism, time to move to Mars..:)
We need a War on Internet Commies. It’s a shame all the good commie-fighting leaders have gone, Dubya won’t be much use.
This kind of attack was often done by a mix of “S h i t Youth” and the government internet agents of PRC. Some of them think that China is getting economically powerful, now they can export censorship overseas by all means. These attackers may not totally controlled by the government and some corrupted officers.
“S h i t Youth” is a nick name of “Angry Youth” in Chinese sub-culture in the mainland China. In Chinese mandarin, “angry” sounds like “shit”.
Noticeably absent are links to the offending documents…. Come on Mike, let’s post the links and full documents, deal with a DOS attack for a day or two and make national headlines for “Denial of Service Attacks On Leading American Tech Website Traced To Chinese Government!”
It will be worth it!
Well, if #36 is true, and this gets worse or keeps happening then we should cut all internet lines going in and out of china. Basically, sending them a message: fuck off commies.
I don’t like how they bully american companies either or how they play unfair(by redirecting to baidu, etc.)
The danger of a world bullied by China is real. Anyways, this really pisses me off.
Chinese Attack in Mountain View, California, United States
Is this the new trick to getting TechCrunch coverage? Claim a Chinese DOS attack?
Hey Mike, we’re being deluged by Chinese government hackers! Write about us! We think they are attacking us because we are discussing global warming among child sex slaves in Tibet.
@38 … that is why we must help India all we can, they are the only counter-balance to China unless somehow we merge the entire western world into 1. India is a democracy, I’d much rather live in an Indo-centric world than a Sino-centric world.
Question is, when a big company like CNN also faces the wrath of China (I am ok with them blocking the websites and allowing only 3-4 web pages available to chinese people) and gets DoS attacks, is anybody going to do anything about this? There is no UN style organization to provide justice.
Sigh.. unfortunate
Actually, if slideshare uses amazon aws (do they? forgotton if it was slide or slideshare), wonder if amazon’s gonna bill for ddos traffic… 2.5GB/s for several hours would amount to what?..
Could the TC editors ask amazon? In fact, it has been a question for a number of startups, of “unpredictable” charges…
If would be nice if aws would also let the user set some cap on the monthly charge, wouldn’t it?..
Nice to know.
Now that capitalist Russia under Putin are our Christendom brothern, time to rearm the Ruskies with some advance nuke technology, being that they are closer to China than America can ever get!
Should we just call it preemptive? Or, Dead or Alive.
Obviously the thing to do is get copies of these controversial files and start up healthy torrents of them.
That’s the problem with censorship: you just make the censored item far more desirable.
@someone Very good point! This is an information war not a nuclear war!
2.5 gbps? so get a 4 gbps connection. problem solved.
ha!
Where are thoses files so that we can copy them to GoogleDoc / slide.com /zoho , make an video version on youtube and see what happen ?
Can China export it’s information control on the Internet ?
Marvel
love the video response feature.
I think it was not only China attackers, it may be attacks from servers which are based on chinese data-centres. It may be american or european hackers, who use chinese servers too.