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A significant cyberattack aimed at Uyghur Post has been detected and reported to U.S. authorities, following several days of disruption caused by what experts have described as a large-scale, coordinated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to a report by Uyghur Times (UT).
Starting March 9, Uyghur Post faced continuous and intense traffic flooding that made its website intermittently unavailable. Based on internal data and inputs from technical partners, daily service requests surged to nearly 185.68 million, overwhelming the servers and resulting in repeated outages. At the height of the attack, users trying to access the website encountered "connection timed out" messages, indicating that the servers were unable to handle the volume of malicious traffic, the UT report noted. Technical examination of the attack showed that a large share of the malicious traffic originated from a single IP address--154.85.40.131. IP tracing tools indicated that the source was located in Singapore, with network ownership linked to Baidu Netcom Science and Technology Co. Ltd., a major Chinese technology firm. However, Uyghur Times stated that it has not independently confirmed the exact origin of the IP addresses or the cyberattacks. Cybersecurity specialists involved in addressing the incident said that the scale, coordination, and infrastructure used in the attack align with patterns observed in earlier state-linked or state-supported cyber operations. The Uyghur Post team has officially reported the incident to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cybercrime division, as well as to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under the Department of Homeland Security, as cited in the UT report. "This was not a random incident. It was deliberate, prolonged, and highly coordinated," a member of the technical response team said. "The intention was clearly to silence independent Uyghur media." Tahir Imin, founder of the Uyghur-language media network, stated that this effort is part of China's long-running campaign of transnational repression targeting Uyghur media outlets, academics, and journalists. "This is not the first time that the group I work with or I have been targeted by the Chinese government," he said. Uyghur Times, along with other Uyghur websites, had also faced another wave of cyberattacks in September 2019, according to Volexity, as referenced in the UT report. (ANI)
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