On April 18, CNN.com was temporally unavailable in mainland China. CNN later confirmed that its website “was targeted by attempts to interrupt its news Web site, resulting in countermeasures that caused the service to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia.”
Some Chinese hackers celebrated success by using a picture, allegedly was grabbed from the hacked CNN’s website. (See it here. )
Today’s The Beijing News ran an article doubting if this screen grab was really from the CNN website, or just another site with the misfortune to have the letters “cnn” in its URL. The website appears not yet fully recovered, but based on its URL “sports.si.cnn.com“, it seems the argument is rather unnecessary: No mistake, it is part of CNN.com and it is screwed.
The top picture is screen grab that shows the current state of the website. The second image shows the hacked web page and the slogans left by the hackers, both in English and Chinese. This image is circulating on the Internet like a trophy of the hackers’ success at “making CNN.com disappear from the earth.”