Denial-of-service attacks(DDoS) are the most common method used by hackers when trying to sabotage the servers of any given entity. This weekend, someone locked in the target as China, and launched a huge denial-of-service attack on the Chinese internet. The attack took down a significant part of the internet in China for many hours.
According to Chinese authorities, this attack was launched at 2 a.m. on Sunday and is the largest denial-of-service attack that the country has ever witnessed. The attack continued for many long hours and it became even more intense at about 4 a.m.
It was targeted at the registry which lets users access such sites which have the ‘.cn’ extension. Given the scale of the attack, it was successful in taking down the registry for four hours, thus denying access to such users who were trying to reach any ‘.cn’ site.
While denial-of-service attacks are really common, they are not always very successful. For instance, in the past, many organizations have been targeted using the attacks but since these attacks require a lot of resources, they often fall short of their goals.
In the case of the attack on the Chinese internet, however, an unprecedented amount of resources had to be used to somehow affect the country’s internet. While some experts have tried to style this attack as something which even an individual could have caused, the fact remains that nearly all major DDoS attacks in the past have utilized thousands of computers. So it would be safe to assume that an even greater amount of computing prowess was consumed in this attack and there’s a possibility that a significant entity, and not an individual, pulled it off.
Source: WSJ
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