China TV deletes video that led to hacking fears

This week,Western analysts began scrutinising a sequence that a narrator on the program says shows “many Internet attack methods.” There is then a demonstration of one method: on the screen,what appears to be a human-operated cursor chooses a target web address,then hits a button that says “attack.”

Using a software application on screen,the cursor chooses a target website under a pull-down menu for “Falun Gong websites in North America.” Falun Gong is a spiritual group that underwent persecution in the late 1990s in China and is now outlawed in the country.

In the CCTV program,the cursor selects an IP address as a target. It is a defunct IP address at the University of Alabama. But a screenshot of the page linked to that address that was archived on the Internet in 2000 shows an informational page associated with Falun Gong. It is unclear who set up the page.

An online article published on China SignPost on Wednesday by two military analysts,Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins,said there were questions as to whether the television program was using a mock-up to demonstrate cyberwarfare,or if it revealed real hacking software and an actual attack. “It is significant that an official Chinese state television channel showed even a symbolic representation of a cyberattack,particularly one on entities clearly located in a foreign sovereign nation,” they wrote.

By Friday,a video of the episode had been removed from a CCTV website that still has other episodes of the same show.