Chinese DDoS siege 'costs anti-censorship site $30,000 a day'

A site providing access to censored traffic in China is under bombardment from DDoS attacks, costing it $30,000 a day to fend off.

Greatfire.org provides Chinese internet users with websites banned by the authorities, but is now having to splash out on more Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers to cope with billions of access requests an hour.

Site admin Charlie Smith has appealed for hackers' help to see off the DDoS attacks, in which servers are hit with an overwhelming number of access requests by multiple computers in an attempt to overload them.

He wrote: "We are not equipped to handle a DDoS attack of this magnitude and we need help. This kind of attack is aggressive and is an exhibition of censorship by brute force.

"Attackers resort to tactics like this when they are left with no other options."

The website began experiencing the problems on March 17, and yesterday claimed to receive a peak 2.6 billion requests per hour - about 2,500 times the site's normal traffic.

Smith and his cohorts have already upgraded to faster servers on Amazon, and are also using other techniques to manage the deluge.

But he called for outside expertise, as well as people to ask Amazon to waive the daily server fees.

"If they do not forgo this, this will put a significant squeeze on our operations," said Smith.

"We need companies like Amazon to be on our side and, more importantly, on the side of freedom of speech."

While he was quick to point out he doesn't know who is behind the attacks, he claimed China's leadership has piled pressure on Greatfire in recent weeks, following a Wall Street Journal article outlining cloud providers' roles in helping free speech activists get round internet censorship.

Services run by providers Amazon, Microsoft and Akamai are all designed to speed up websites, but the alleged misuse of platforms by app developers mean they are being used to bypass firewalls in China.

The Cyberspace Administration of China even branded Greatfire an "anti-China website", Smith added.

IT Pro has contacted AWS to ask whether it is considering waiving the extra server costs.