Carrefour has borne the brunt of China's anger over the way the Olympic torch relay was disrupted during its brief transit through Paris earlier this month and the subsequent threat by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games. In recent days, a number of demonstrations have be staged outside Carrefour stores around China amid calls for shoppers to boycott the supermarket chain. However, that's not it, this issue has gained momentum online. Fuelled by anti-Western nationalism, patriotic Chinese hackers have come to the defense of the motherland in response criticism of Beijing's handling of recent pro-independence riots by ethnic Tibetans. The hackers are believed to be behind recent attacks on several US websites and a Chinese website run by the French supermarket chain Carrefour. Scott Henderson, a former US Army intelligence analyst who wrote a book about Chinese hackers called The Dark Visitor, has been tracking developments on his blog and says that what's happened over the past week may be the opening salvo in new cyber war. Last week, US broadcaster CNN was targeted in a dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attack intended to interrupt its news website. The attack was repelled "resulting in countermeasures that caused the service to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia", CNN reported. In a DDoS attack, hackers flood a targeted website with thousands of automated requests for service in order to jam the works. It came just before a planned attack against the CNN website by a group calling itself Revenge of the Flame - in reference to the Olympic Torch - was called off.

CNN has been accused of skewing its news coverage of the crackdown in Tibet to cast China in a negative light in the lead up to the summer Olympic Games. CNN commentator Jack Cafferty further inflamed the situation when earlier this month, he labelled Chinese goods "junk" and its leaders a "bunch of goons and thugs".

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