"China Digital Age" founder suspected of cyber attack: technical failure

China Digital Times, a Chinese-English bilingual news website headquartered in California, is one of the sources for many overseas Chinese to browse censored information on the Chinese Internet. Starting from March 7, some readers were unable to read the Chinese content of the website.

Xiao Qiang, the founder of "China Digital Times", responded to this station's interview in writing on Friday, saying, "The Digital Times Chinese website did have a technical failure yesterday (March 7), and it has now been restored. The reason is still being investigated, and it should not be the case. Network attacks."

When asked whether China Digital Times had experienced cyber attacks, Xiao Qiang mentioned a public report in 2017. He said that in February of that year, China Digital Times reporters received a series of phishing emails, and the sender claimed to have inside information about the hacker attack on Der Spiegel News. The link in the email seemed to be the login page of the "China Digital Times" content management system, but in fact it was intended to steal the reporter's account information in order to enter the system to publish content. The report pointed out that the staff of "China Digital Times" became suspicious of the email and handed it over to the Citizen Laboratory of the University of Toronto in Canada for analysis. Citizen Lab’s investigation found that the incident involved not only China Digital Age, but also some websites that often report on topics considered taboo or controversial by the Chinese government, such as Der Spiegel News, The Epoch Times, Hong Kong 01 and UBM News wait.

According to a press release from Citizen Lab, in recent years, mainstream Western news organizations such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have also pointed out that the hacker groups that invaded their computer networks and systems are located in China. However, there was no conclusive evidence at the time that the organization launching the related cyber attacks was an attacker that had been publicly reported or was supported by any country.

Xiao Qiang is a researcher at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in state censorship, political propaganda, disinformation, and China’s emerging artificial intelligence technology driving mass surveillance and social control. He founded "China Digital Times" in the fall of 2003 with the purpose of exploring how to use cutting-edge technology to present online information from and about China.