China encounters largest denial-of-service attack, network goes down for a day

26 Aug, 2013 | by Anujeet Majumdar | 

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Early on Sunday morning, part of China’s Internet network went down due to an external attack. The attack was termed by the government as the largest denial-of-service attack ever encountered, according to the Wall Street Journal.  The first wave, according to the report, struck at 2 a.m. in the morning, followed by a secondary attack two hours later. The attack was first noted by the China Internet Network Information Center, which rolled out an apology for affected users, while promising to improve its “service capabilities”. Denial-of-service attacks normally work by overwhelming a computer or network with a lot of online activity. This usually originates from networks of computers that have been hacked by malware or viruses. The attack was reportedly aimed at the registry which gives users access to sites with the extension “.cn”. The attack probably shut down the registry for about two to four hours, according to CloudFlare. CloudFlare provides Internet performance and security services for more than a million websites. It should be noted that many service providers store a record of parts of the registry for a set period of time. This means that, though the registry was down, the outage only affected a portion of the websites for a few users. Half of China's Internet network went down following denial-of-service attack (Image credit: Getty Images) By Monday the issue seems to have been resolved, with Chinese Internet users being able to access websites like social networking site Weibo, according to the report. While talking about this, CloudFlare Chief Executive Matthew Prince told the source that the company observed a 32 percent drop in traffic. This drop included thousands of Chinese domains on the company’s network as compared to the traffic seen 24 hours earlier. It should be noted that China has one of the most complex filtering systems in the world. This does not prevent the same from being susceptible from an attack, though, which could have been carried out by a single individual, according to CloudFlare. While talking about this, Prince said, “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.”