serious, serious problem

The site we all know and love, marxists.org, is under serious, life-threatening attack, possibly - seemingly - directed by the Chinese Government.

In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.

While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.

While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.

Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.

As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our colocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.

At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.

The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.

Now, look. I'll admit to something of a fascination with the PRC. Veteran blogtypes even know the long form of my pseudo-handle. I am fully aware of the human-rights abuses, of the not-actually existing socialism of the place. I've been there, I've seen it with my own eyes. But seriously, if this is true, forget it, forget my half-affection, the grain of salt with which I read all the western critiques of the place. I'm going to burn the fucking Little Red Book I bought there. I am going to forget semi-plans to figure out the viability of attending the Beijing Olympics. My university has a bigtime exchange agreement with several universities in China; I was just today looking at the brochures, thinking about taking part. No more!!!! Marxists.org is one of the good things in the world. What someone else might call a "category killer" of the left internet - I use it on an almost daily basis as just about everything is there.

Seriously, you've driven me to it:

Comments

[Matt]

Shit's fucked up.

I mean, "how terribly undemocratic."

[Swifty]

I wonder why China would want to destroy the Marxist archive.

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=61

[AngelaW]

Seriously, I don't think PRC has the motivation of doing so. Even talking about online attacks its government has been engaging in, much more threatening objects are out there for them to take care of.

[CR]

Dunno. I'm taking the marxists.org people's word for it for now. And anyway, I'd guess that the specter of marx would actually be quite threatening to the regime. After all, one the the aspects of Tianamen that never really got through in the west was that a sizable portion of the protestors (not all, of course) were agitating for more, not less, communism in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's "To Get Rich is Glorious" reforms.

If you accept the site's claims that the attacking ip's are chinese, what is your theory about the reason for the DNS attacks? Just independently malevolent hackers? Could be, I suppose...

[$]

Bastards!

Can we counter-attack with lawsuits, or are going to have to bombard them?

[muhahaha]

the PRC has:

1. Huge (staggering, by US standards) amounts of connectivity and broadband penetration

2. A major problem with software piracy so that lots of servers or PCs there are likely to be running pirated and insecure software, running on a pirated OS version that, as it is pirated, cannot download security updates

3. Large telco + ISPs that are not exactly noted for a good track record on network security

Those three make for a lethal combination - there's a positive cornucopia of insecure machines in China for script kiddies around the world to dip into.

I wouldn't speculate about "cyberwar!" without thinking a lot more about these factors.

[Bob Allen]

This is perhaps the most interesting thing I've seen on the Web in awhile-- if these attacks are politically motivated, it makes alot of sense. I have only been a Marxist for about 10 years and I'm outside academia, so my location gives me a certain perspective. In light of the Chinese leadership's purposeful downplaying of "ideology", linked with the potentiality of technical ability to spread their form of Marxist theory worldwide if they wanted to, it now makes sense that Mao was prescient (again). They don't want to. Objective conditions have determined them to be on the capitalist road, big time, and they don't want any interruptions.
Now, it could be that the server attacks are a result of technical aberrations as one poster suggests. I sense that the MIA staff are no dummies, however paranoia strikes deep even in the most rarified intellectual circles when it comes to Marxism. On the whole , I think the attacks are probably politically motivated. Call it an educated guess.

[muhahaha]

These are good:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3553

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:THpjhVtrIsUJ:www.istar.upenn.edu/research/JSTAR%2520Article%2520-%2520Daniel%2520Asen.pdf+prc+hacking&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8