By Tenzin Dharpo
DHARAMSHALA, August 13: The website selling tickets for His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s teaching in Boulder, Colorado, had faced persistent technical glitches and eventual crash for several hours on Monday prompting the organizing committee to raise suspicion of foreign cyber attacks to disrupt the proceedings.
The 80 year old Nobel Laureate is scheduled to give a two day teaching at the request of the Tibetan Association of Colorado and the University of Colorado on August 20-21 during which he will give religious discourse and a public talk to the faculty and students of the university on ‘Educating the heart and Mind’ under the banner of ‘Compassion in Action’ initiative.
The ticket sales for the event on Monday morning initially faced some technical difficulties of automatically opening multiple pages when the particular website was accessed by buyers. The website eventually crashed for 4-5 hours with hordes of people in the Colorado state as well as other places in the United States being unable to buy tickets or access the website.
Ani Tenzin Lhamo, a member of the Tibetan Association of Colorado told Colorado News, “It (website) totally crashed and they were having a tough time explaining what happened”. The disruption caused the online buyers confusion of the persistent website crash resulting in almost 270 mails from ticket buyers seeking help.
The Facebook account of the organizing committee also had similar disturbances. The glitch with strong characteristics of foreign cyber attacks, possibly Chinese hackers, had troubled the organizers for a several hours although the ticket sales were resumed later to be sold out.
In June 2015, United State’s National Security Agency condemned the cyber attacks originating from China that hacked into federal employee data and other secured US government data pools that affected 4.2 million government employees and labeled them ‘state sponsored’.
Speaking on June 24 at a high level security and economic talks with Chinese officials, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew stated, “We remain deeply concerned about Chinese government-sponsored cyber-enabled theft.” Last month, US President Barack Obama banned his government from buying Chinese computer technology for fear of cyber attacks from China.
