Reportage – 2006

Tibetans wake up to website hack on their new year

DHARAMSHALA, India, 1 March 2006

It was Losar or the first day of their 2133 fire-dog year on Tuesday, but instead of celebration some exile Tibetans woke up to websites hacked and wiped out.

As many as 60 Tibetan websites, including human rights, educational, environment, art and youth websites were completely obliterated from their server in the US. "It cannot be work of anybody else apart from those who feel the impact of these sites," says Tenzin Norgay, the in-charge of the UN affairs of the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) based in Dharamshala.

TCHRD, a non-governmental organisation monitoring the human rights situation in Tibet, based in Dharamshala, has its web site obliterated among others.

It may have come as a disastrous Losar gift for them, but the Tibetans are confident that the sites will be back up in matter of days. "The Internet is the virtual world for the Tibetans since we don't have our country now. We knew things like this would happen. Since the Internet Is an important means for us to strengthen our movement," Norgay says.

China has meanwhile launched a new Tibetan cultural site on the eve of the Tibetan New Year. "There is a big difference between a communist propaganda site and a site made in a free world," Norgay says. "The contents are desperately promoting and trying to impose their agendas."

It is commonly known that the Chinese government blocks from its citizens websites that contain information about democracy, human rights, Taiwanese independence, freedom in Tibet, the activities of the Dalai Lama and similar issues that are thorny to the central government.

Experts say that China has a huge army of trained staff to systematically censor the Internet, and believe that thousands of sites are blocked although the exact figure is not known.

All websites are routed through government-controlled filters and the sites that are unacceptable are blocked.

The exiled Tibetans have long been a target of hackers. Attempts are constant at the server of the Tibetan government-in-exiles.

"We see these attempts coming from China," says Yahel Ben-David, a systems management consultant and security adviser to the exiled government.

The exiled government's server has not been hacked so far. "We have the state-of-the-art security system. Conventional hackers will not be able to hack our system and we upgrade the security system constantly," Yahel says.

Spoofed emails with virus attachment carrying addresses of exiled government officials are a common menace. "Many of these spoofed emails are traced to originate from China," Yahel says.

The exile government receives around a couple thousand emails every day. Out of this figure 72 percent are junks, which are filtered at a server in the USA before even reaching Dharamshala.