Chinese Internet Blasted By ‘Biggest DDoS It’s Seen’

A portion of Chinese-based Internet was disrupted on Sunday, thanks to a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The government said it was the biggest it had ever experienced, as the attack flooded networking infrastructure at the China Internet Network Information Center, which manages the .cn top level domain and the Chinese domain name system.

China hit by massive DDoS

One attack hit the body at 2am on Sunday morning, with another more powerful DDoS arriving just two hours later. It is believed a swathe of sites went down, whilst others experienced “slow or interrupted access”.

The attack appeared to have been overcome by Monday. Security experts spotted aberrations hinting at a significant DDoS in China. “Arbor saw a significant increase in DDoS attacks targeting .cn on Sunday,” Dan Holden, director of research at Arbor Networks, said in an email sent to TechWeekEurope.

“The number of attacks more than doubled and ATLAS traffic statistics show a significant increase in attack size,  indicating a serious attack was carried out.”

CloudFlare, a content delivery network, said it had seen a 32 percent dip in traffic for Chinese sites sitting on its CDN when compared to the same period a day before.

“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,” CEO Matthew Prince told the Wall Street Journal, adding that it could have been an individual rather than a group that carried out the attack.

China is home to a lot of DDoS activity. Akamai recently claimed the country saw 34 percent of global DDoS traffic in fourth quarter of 2012.

There have been a number of significant DDoS attacks of late, with suggestions of political motivations. Hosting provider GreenNet, which describes itself as an ethical hoster and ISP, with Privacy International and Fair Trade Africa amongst its customers, was knocked offline by significant DDoS strikes earlier this month.

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