China Digital Times

China Digital Times and the Fight Against Censorship

For over two decades, China Digital Times (CDT) has served as a vital "Resistance Media" outlet, dedicated to documenting and disseminating information scrubbed from the Chinese Internet. By archiving articles, social media posts, and comments deleted by authorities, CDT ensures that people’s voices online are protected. This mission makes them a relentless target for sophisticated cyberattacks.

The Real Cost of Cyber Threats

CDT’s web presence is critical for its ability to reach audiences. Strong cybersecurity also keeps staff safe. A large-scale data breach remains the group’s primary concern. A successful intrusion of its systems could compromise more than 20 years of archives and, more critically, expose the identities of editors and put them in harm’s way.

Cloudflare’s Impact

Before joining Project Galileo, the organization was frequently knocked offline by cyberattacks. But as an organization with a small, largely part-time staff, CDT had few in-house resources to dedicate to maintaining a secure and persistent website.

Now, Project Galileo has made protection accessible to CDT, allowing the organization to redirect its limited funds toward its editorial mission and innovative new initiatives, such as leveraging AI to more easily track the daily disappearance of media accounts. “Services like Cloudflare effectively provide the infrastructure that allow us to stand up against online censorship,” said Xiao Qiang, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of CDT.

CDT utilizes a range of Cloudflare products to maintain a high-performance, secure bridge between its content and the organization’s global audience:

• DDoS Protection: Automatically detects and mitigates large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks. For CDT, this means that even well-resourced attacks rarely last long, ensuring the organization’s archive remains accessible.
• Web Application Firewall (WAF): China Digital Times implemented a WAF rule with a Managed Challenge, which in the space of one 24 hour period issued 21,000 challenges with only 8 solved. The organization also introduced a rule with a Block action, which over a course of one 24 hour period blocked 41,000 requests to its website. This protection helps prevent unauthorized access to CDT’s servers, protecting the integrity of the organization’s data and the safety of the team.
• Global CDN & Caching: By serving over 60% of its traffic from Cloudflare’s edge nodes, CDT significantly reduces the bandwidth and computational load on its origin servers. This lowers operational costs and improves the browsing experience for users globally.

"Without Cloudflare, we would have had to turn to other specialized anti-attack service providers—not only would the costs be high, but the protection effectiveness and coverage would often be difficult to compare." - Xiao Qiang