The Chinese-language website of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) has been hacked into and rendered inaccessible by a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. CHRD is a China-based non-governmental network of grassroots and international human rights defenders dedicated to promoting human rights and empowering grassroots activism in China. CHRD’s website is hosted outside the country by the US-based company Go Daddy.

Further Information

On 25 March 2010, hackers reportedly started attacks against the servers which host CHRD's website. As a result of these ongoing DDoS attacks, the Chinese-language CHRD website (http://www.crd-net.org) has now been rendered inaccessible for five days. CHRD has not yet been able to identify the source of the attacks.

This is the second time this year that CHRD's website has been targeted. On 23 January 2010, the website was out of service for approximately 16 hours following a similar attack. Other websites run by Chinese human rights defenders, including Independent Chinese PEN, New Century News, Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch and Canyu were also targeted at the same time.

DDoS attacks are being increasingly used to target websites operated by Chinese human rights defenders. Go Daddy has reported a recent increase in the number of DDoS attacks on its systems, many of which appear to originate in China.

On 24 March 2010, Go Daddy’s executive vice-president and general counsel Ms Christine N. Jones announced that Go Daddy will discontinue registering new Chinese (.cn) domain names following the introduction of the new Chinese government guidelines in December 2009 which require that individuals provide detailed identification before registering.

These attacks take place in the context of Google’s recent decision to stop filtering results on its Chinese-language search engine in protest against China's censorship laws and recent attacks by hackers in China. Front Line believes that the attacks on CHRD's website are directly related to CHRD's human rights activities and constitute an attempt to prevent human rights defenders in China from disseminating information online.