Pakistan Cyber Army Targets China in Defacement War

Shortly after a few Pakistani websites were defaced, the Pakistan Cyber Army (PCA) responded with a massive defacement campaign focusing on China, less than 24-hours after taking out 26 Bangladeshi government domains.

As is the case with most defacements from the PCA, or similar groups, the motive is mostly entertainment – unless there is a chance for political propagandizing. According to messages left by the PCA, it would see that propaganda was the aim this time around.

“For those who are killing innocent Muslims, disturbing them, we gave you warning Hindu and Christians, but you didn’t stop your cheapless (sic) acts. We are Pak cyber attackers,” one of the defacement messages says.

Adding to the rhetoric, the message continues and explains that the defacement is an attack against “…those who abuse Mohammad, who abused our religion, who insulted our religion, who killed innocent Muslims. Islam is religion of peace, stop making fun of Muslims and Mohammad!!! We only have fear of Allah, we are the soldiers of Islam!!!!”

The defacements targeted 26 domains maintained by the Bangladeshi government, and less than a day later, the message was altered some and aimed at China. In all, some 430 Chinese domains / sub-domains were defaced in a single attack.

At the time this story was written, a majority of the Chinese domains were still offline; others remained defaced. The majority of the Chinese defacements were on domains maintained by the Xuchang City People’s Procuratorate.

Last month, hundreds of Pakistani portals and Web sites were targeted in a DNS attack, which hijacked their presence on the Web, giving the appearance of a mass defacement. Pakistani URLs maintained by Sony, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal, Fanta, Coke, Apple, HP, and Google all had their DNS poisoned and redistricted to websites with tags from a known Turkish hacking group.