Foundation Site Hit by Pro-China Hackers

By NICOLE WALLACE

Early this month a prominent American foundation found its Web site the target of pro-China hackers angry about the mid-air collision of an American surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet.

When employees of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, arrived at work on May 4, they found that the front page of the foundation’s Web site had been replaced with a Chinese flag flying on a black background, accompanied by the message, “Hacked Fighting for Freedome.”

The attackers did not do any additional damage to the site, and it took the foundation’s information-technology staff less than an hour to restore the home page to its original condition.

In recent weeks, pro-China hackers have defaced or attempted to overwhelm various government and corporate Web sites, including those run by the White House, the U.S. Transportation Board, Pacific Bell Internet Services, and UUNet. Hackers sympathetic to the American side of the spy-plane controversy have, in turn, attacked sites run by Chinese companies and government agencies.

The MacArthur Foundation does not believe that there was any particular reason why it was singled out. “The foundation has a reasonably high degree of name identification, and it appears that those were the types of organizations that were hacked,” said Ray Boyer, MacArthur’s spokesman.