From China to a tin-pot dictator

Internet censorship grows in even the smallest nations on earth:

In the African nation of Mauritania, the military dictatorship has used Cyber War techniques to shut down two opposition web sites that provide the most information on what is going on inside the country. The generals apparently hired several botnets (networks of illegally controlled PCs, yours might be one of them and you wouldn’t know it) to smother the anti-dictatorship websites with phony visitors (a “DDOS attack”). The botnets (tens, or hundreds of thousands of hijacked PCs) are run by criminals who rent them out for sending spam, DDOS attacks or several other types of Internet based scams.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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