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Massive cyberattack cripples Chinese websites

Massive cyberattack cripples Chinese websites

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china / chinese flag (STOCK)
china / chinese flag (STOCK)

China's government says that it faced the largest denial of service attack that it's ever seen this Sunday, sending access to .cn websites to crawling speeds — if they could be accessed at all. The China Internet Network Information Center, which manages the .cn domain, said that the attacks occurred around 2AM and 4AM Sunday morning, with service being slowly restored afterward. It apologized for the disruption of service, but didn't give any suggestion as to the source or motivation behind the attack. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, the web delivery network CloudFlare reported seeing a 32 percent drop in traffic across the Chinese domains hosted on its network during the attack.

In the past year, China has frequently been the aggressor when it comes to cyberattacks. The country is believed to have increasingly strong capabilities when it comes to hacking, but whether this came from inside or outside of the country, there's no sign yet that it took a technological powerhouse to take .cn down. "It is not necessarily correct to infer that the attacker in this case had a significant amount of technical sophistication or resources,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince wrote to the Journal. "It may have well have been a single individual."