Change.org DDoSed Following Ai Weiwei Release Petition

Online campaigning platform change.org has been the target of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since Monday, following the hosting of a petition that calls for the release from custody of Ai Weiwei, a leading Chinese artist.

Ai is best known for being the primary artistic consultant for the building Beijing National Stadium, commonly referred to as the "Bird's Nest."

His impressive Sunflower Seeds exhibition is currently on display at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall and consists of one hundred million hand crafted porcelain sunflower seeds.

An outspoken critic of the Chinese government he was arrested on April 3, allegedly for tax evasion, bigamy and spreading indecent images on the Internet.

Convinced that his detainment is related to political activism and not any actual crime, international governments, human rights groups, museums and artists all over the world have called for his release.

A petition in this respect hosted on change.org has been signed by over 100,000 people and is currently the most popular campaign running on the website.

However, according to the site's administrators it also attracted some enemies, and change.org began being attacked on Monday by computers from China.

"We do not know the reason or exact source of these attacks," said Ben Rattray, the founder of Change.org. "All we know is that after the unprecedented success of a campaign by leading global art museums using our platform to call on the Chinese government to release Ai Weiwei, we became the victims of highly sophisticated denial of service attacks from locations in China."

Mr. Rattray didn't go into details about the technical aspects of the attack, like how many computers are participating, what traffic are they generating and what technique is being used. It would be very interesting if this proves out to be an HTTP flood attack because Change.org is banned in China.

The website admins have notified the authorities about the attacks and asked for assistance from the U.S. State Department.