Tibet, China, Hacked, and The Sports Network

Monday, April 21, 2008


Screen grab from the original hack by Christine Lu

Caught this down at Techcrunch which was tipped off by Christine Lu who also got screenshots of the original hack:


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.
Right now the site simply says "The Sports Network website and other major news sites have been hacked by a political entity from China, and as a result are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding. Sports Network Management."

Good questions to ask: Is it really a political entity? What do we really know?

Read Christine Lu's in-depth post on the hack (with images) as well as Techcrunch's.