Anti-Censorship Service Greatfire Hit With DDoS Attack

Whoever is behind the attack is likely not a big fan of Greatfire's services, which are designed to help Web surfers in China evade the country's censorship policies.

The website greatfire.org appears to be under a massive distributed denial of service attackthe service's first, undoubtedly prompted by the mention of Greatfire in a recent Wall Street Journal article about online censorship in China.

Greatfire, for those unaware, allows uses to look up websites and keywords to see whether they're actively being blocked or otherwise censored by the Chinese governmentThe Great Firewall, as its commonly known. The website also maintains a number of mirrors of popular websites like Google, Boxun, and microblogging website Weibo, so users can access them sans restrictions.

Part of the site's success, as described in a 2014 Bloomberg article,, lies in the fact that Greatfire hosts its mirrors using Amazon's Web Services. Everything on Amazon Web Services is encrypted, so it's impossible to tell whether requests are for legitimate sites or sites that China's censors would otherwise target for content. So, to block Greatfire's service, China would have to block Amazon Web Services in general, which would undoubtedly hack off a number of businesses and other entities using Amazon's service for legitimate means.

According to Greatfire, the DDoS attack started on Tuesday, and it's hitting the site's mirrors with around 2.6 billion requests per hour (2500 times its normal traffic).

"While we have talked openly about our method of using collateral freedom to unblock websites and mobile apps that have been blocked by the Chinese authorities, the WSJ story clearly stated how the strategy works and how it is being used successfully to deliver uncensored content into China," reads a Greatfire blog post.

"We don't know who is behind this attack. However, the attack coincides with increased pressure on our organization over the last few months. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) publicly called us 'an anti-China website set up by an overseas anti-China organization'. We also know that CAC has put pressure on our IT partners to stop working with us. Recently, we noticed that somebody was trying to impersonate us to intercept our encrypted email."

The DDoS has allegedly bumped up Greatfire's hosting costs over at Amazon to just around $30,000 daily. It remains to be seen whether Amazon will lessen that amount as a result of the attack, or just eliminate the extra hosting cost entirely.

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Anti-Censorship Service Greatfire Hit With DDoS Attack