By Xeni Jardin
Organizers of a community wireless mesh-network project in Dharamshala, India, say their website was attacked on Thursday, following publication of a Wired News article about their work for Tibetan refugee settlements.
Speaking to Wired News via Skype, project founder Yahel Ben-David said that while the distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on the Tibetan Technology Center website appeared to come from IP addresses from a number of places around the world, they began immediately after scans from an IP address in China.
“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.
The tibtec.org website was featured in a Wired News story published on Thursday about the group’s efforts to build a wireless mesh network serving Tibetan exiles. The site is built with Drupal, and runs on Apache.
“It was down for over 30 minutes,” said Ben-David. “I couldn’t log in because thousands of http processes were running, demanding resources from the MySql database.”
Network operations for the Dharamshala wireless mesh network are managed separately, with extensive access controls, and were not affected by the attack.
“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.”
