The New York-based Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party, also known as Tuidang Center, and its platform have recently come under large-scale cyberattacks by the Chinese communist regime, according to their technical lead.
Xiao Jun, the center’s technical lead and head of its “Tianchao Messenger” platform, told The Epoch Times on June 10 that the center’s defense system successfully blocked up to 300 million malicious requests in 45 minutes. These requests targeted the center’s firewall-bypassing domain, peaking at more than 110,000 per second.
This highly targeted, large-scale cyberattack began on the eve of U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to China on May 13 and continued through the end of May, Xiao said.
The website’s security defense system successfully thwarted the attack by employing strategies such as dynamically diverting traffic and blocking malicious nodes. The system has been operating stably at the highest security level, and all data remains completely secure, Xiao said.
In addition to the Tuidang Center, the Tianchao Messenger platform provides access to other websites, enabling mainland Chinese users to browse their content without circumvention tools, including overseas media outlets that report uncensored news about China, such as The Epoch Times and its sister media outlet NTD, as well as Sound of Hope, Aboluowang, China Banned Films, and others.
They also include websites about Falun Gong and related human rights issues, such as the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong and Minghui.org.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a traditional Chinese spiritual practice based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It grew in popularity during the 1990s, with estimates at the time putting the number of practitioners in China at 70 million to 100 million by the end of the decade.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under its then-leader Jiang Zemin, viewing the practice’s popularity as a threat to its authority, launched a systematic elimination campaign in July 1999. Since then, millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Information about Falun Gong and the CCP’s unlawful and brutal ongoing persecution against the faith group is deemed highly sensitive by the Chinese regime and has been censored in mainland China.
The CCP uses its sophisticated and extensive system of internet censorship and surveillance tool—the Great Firewall of China—to restrict the Chinese public’s access to overseas websites to obtain truthful information about Falun Gong, the real situations in China, and the truth about the communist regime.
The reason for the CCP’s attack on the Tuidang Center is that internet users in mainland China can access this platform with virtually no barriers, consume unrestricted information on overseas websites, and communicate freely with the outside world, Xiao said.
“We have received feedback that in the past, some mainland citizens or dissidents, after livestreaming or exposing local movements of resistance or rights advocacy, were asked by the police during interrogations whether they had visited Tianchao Messenger,” he said.
Other Means of Attack
Xiao said that the CCP’s attacks on the Tianchao Messenger platform have recently been far larger in scale and more frequent, and have also incorporated non-technical methods.“They launch indirect attacks on our associated accounts, such as related Google accounts, to obtain the keys needed to impersonate us or illegally breach our websites or servers,” he said.
They have received written confirmation from service providers such as Google that identify these incidents as “government-linked” hacking activities, Xiao noted.
“We obtained direct evidence of this,” he said. “A portion of the later attacks specifically targeted the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP website.”
In addition, Xiao said, “false complaints were lodged with domain registrars and server providers, alleging, for instance, that the Tianchao Messenger platform hosted phishing content, anti-gay material, or content that leaked personal privacy, violated Chinese law, or involved the abuse of platform services, with the aim of having our domain taken down or our services suspended.”
Wang Zhiyuan, chairman of the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP, told The Epoch Times that the regime’s attacks on the website demonstrate the regime’s fear of the principles promoted by Falun Gong—namely, truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance—and reflect its concern about Falun Gong’s efforts to clarify the truth about the persecution.
“We are exposing the evil nature of the CCP to the public because the CCP is persecuting every single Chinese person,” Wang said. “Since it came to power in 1949, the successive campaigns launched by the CCP have all been campaigns of genocide.
“I believe that an increasing number of people will support us and join us in dismantling the CCP.”
