The SportsNetwork, a privately held sports website located in Hatboro, PA, has been under attack from hackers for about 24 hours. Early Sunday the site was defaced with “Tibet was, is and will always be part of China” messages. Engineers returned the site to normal, but late Sunday evening the site was again hacked and taken offline. The message in the image second above is now all that can be viewed on the site.

The site itself is relatively small, attracting just 264,000 visitors in February 2008 (Comscore, worldwide). But it also powers parts of other large sports sites such as CNN/SI. The domain sports.si.cnn.com, for example, is also down.

I called the general phone number at the site at 3:20 am PST and someone answered right away, confirming the hack and the fact that a team of engineers is trying to get the site back online.

It’s likely that this kind of activity will increase as Chinese frustration over western Olympic protests continues. Some Chinese are simply adding a “Love China” icon to their chat messages. Others are taking much stronger measures, and speculation continues as to whether the Chinese governmet is sponsoring the attacks.

Lots of buzz on this on Twitter right now (where most news seems to be breaking these days). More here as well.

Update: It’s possible that the hackers actually thought they were taking down CNN’s sports site, based on early Twitter messages boasting about it.

Source

Related Posts: On this day...

• WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency: Micah Sifry explores the history, successes and failures of online transparency - 2011
• ACLU to Michigan cops: Stop searching mobile phones during traffic stops - 2011
• Simpson's Character Infographic - 2011
• iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go, transfer to your PC and subsequent devices - 2011
• Google now has a page up showing government takedown requests by country - 2010
• FBI workers accused of spying on dressing room - 2009
• XKCD: The Book - 2009
• Anonymous Declares War on Copyright Enforcers - 2009
• Ancient Advertisement: Honeywell's Electronic Mail - 2009
• The Pirate Bay FTW - 2009