Stefan Mileschin

A massive denial-of-service attack took down much of China’s internet on Sunday. The attack was described as the biggest DoS attack ever faced by the Chinese government.

It began early Sunday and in a couple of hours it picked up to the point that it started to affect users. The attack targeted the .cn registry which was eventually knocked out for two to four hours. Lucliky, most .cn sites weathered the storm, relying on registry records stored by service providers.

The attack appears to have stopped and Chinese users are now able to access all websites smoothly, apart from those that discuss democracy, dissidents, Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre and a few thousand other things communists don’t like to talk about.

The big question is who was behind the attack. Although things are relatively quiet on the international front, China is embroiled in a few internal PR disasters, including the trial of Bo Xilai and a crackdown on social media. The Great Firewall of China is good at filtering embarrassing internet searches, but it was never designed with security in mind. Well, at least not this sort of security.

CloudFlare says the attack could have been carried out by a single individual, despite its sophistication and apparent success, reports the WSJ.

http://news.techeye.net/security/hug...ack-hits-china