China was
under a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack for about four hours during
the early morning of Sunday. The attack occurred at approximately 2a.m in the
morning and another intense one occurred at about 4 a.m.
The attack
mainly affected companies with the .cn domain name. It was reported by Web
Company CloudFlare that traffic on .cn domains on its network went down about
30% during the attack compared to 24 hours earlier.
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| Image: TechHive |
“That’s
likely representative of overall drop in traffic generally,” CloudFlare CEO
Matthew Prince wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal.
Some users of
these websites were still able to have access to the sites due to the fact that
most Chinese service providers store a record of parts of the registry for a
certain period of time.
The DDoS
attack was the largest in the history of the .cn domain according to the China
Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) which is in charge of the domain.
DDoS attacks
always involve sending enormous traffic to a website which will in turn make
the website unavailable to users.
The source of
the attack is yet unknown at the moment and the CNNIC has promised to update
the public once the details of the attacks are known. Most of the .cn domains
are now working perfectly according to reports.
Matthew Prince
indicated that this attack could have emanated from an individual. “I don’t
know how big the pipes of .cn are, but it is not necessarily correct to infer
that the attacker in this case had a significant amount of technical
sophistication or resources,
“It may have
well have been a single individual.” he wrote.
China have
often been the source of many DDoS attacks as it was named the highest source
of DDoS attacks in the first quarter of this year by security vendor Prolexic.
It seems they are the victim this time.
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China’s Internet faced its biggest DDoS attack ever