China Suspected of Targeting U.S. Organizations with Cyberattacks

Uyghur rights groups such as UHRP have been calling for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics on social media, using the hashtag #GenocideGames and citing allegations of human rights abuses of Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups in Xinjiang, where China has been accused of arbitrarily detaining more than 1 million people in internment camps.

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that pro-China accounts had flooded Twitter messages with the #GenocideGames hashtag. Hashtag flooding is the act of hijacking a hashtag on social media platforms to dilute or change its meaning.

In early December, the U.S. announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, citing China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.”

Beijing denies accusations of mass detention and says that all ethnic groups in Xinjiang “live in together in harmony” and experience “healthy and balanced development.”

Tahir Imin, a Uyghur activist and founder of the Washington-based Uyghur Times, says his news organization has long been the target of cyberattacks he believes are coming from China.

Volexity, a Washington-based cybersecurity firm, stated in a September 2019 blog post that “cyberspace has become a battleground for the Uyghur people. The level of surveillance occurring in China against Uyghurs extends well beyond their borders and has fully entered the digital realm.”

“Recently, especially starting from January 10, 2022, we have seen more cyberattacks by unknown hackers aimed at the main index of English and Chinese websites of Uyghur Times,” Imin told VOA, adding that his organization’s email server had also been the target of similar attacks.

FBI Assessment
In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that in the U.S., Beijing had unleashed “a massive, sophisticated hacking program that is bigger than those of every other major nation combined.”

“They’re not just hacking on a huge scale but causing indiscriminate damage to get to what they want,” Wray said. “Like in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack, which compromised the networks of more than 10,000 American companies in a single campaign alone.”

According to Salih Hudayar, president and founder of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, a Washington-based Uyghur independence advocacy group, his group’s website has seen a “severe increase” in cyberattacks in recent weeks, especially since the beginning of the Beijing Winter Games.

“It seems, on average, in the past 24 hours (per hour), we had over 15 million attacks against our website,” Hudayar told VOA, adding that most of the attacks were originating from Singapore.

He said he believed Singapore was being used “to mask the true location” of the origin of the attacks. “We definitely think China is behind this attack,” Hudayar said.

Asim Kashgarian is a journalist at VOA.This article is published courtesy of the Voice of America (VOA).