Anybody who runs their own server gets used to the idea of people attempting to hack into the system. In my experience these attacks normally come from Taiwan.

Yesterday, however, this server received an unprecedented attack from Beijing, China, which lasted for over 8 hours. Specifically the attack came from ip addresses in the ranges 124.115.0.* and 124.115.4.* which, as far as I can tell, resolve back to our warm cuddly friends in the Chinese Government.

I’m not going to take this personally. I’m not naive enough to think that there was someone actually sat in Beijing co-ordinating the attack from some sort of cyber-war room. It was, of course, completely automated. I was just unlucky enough to have my ip address randomly selected as the focus for a Chinese “fishing” expedition.

What I don’t understand is quite what the Chinese Government are hoping to gain by doing this. I can see why they might want to hack into the servers of major corporations and foreign governments. I’m quite sure that our governments do the same sort of thing to them. But do they really want to be able to read my mundane emails?

So all I can really do in protest is to block all known Chinese Government ip addresses in Apache2. Oh… and I’m going to be eating at a Thai restaurant tonight!