Chinese Internet Crippled By DDoS Attack

Chinese authorities say the country experienced the worst distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack it has ever seen on Sunday.

In a public apology, the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) reported that service outages all over the country resulted from the DDoS attack. The CINIC said it is working on service improvements to prevent future similar outages.

CloudFlare, a service provider that monitors and protects websites, told The Wall Street Journal that it saw a 32 percent drop in traffic for thousands of Chinese domains during the attack.

The exploit was aimed at the ".cn" registry, according to CloudFlare, and probably shut down the registry for about two to four hours. Some Chinese sites were able to continue operating because they store parts of the registry locally, according to the report.

“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,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an email to the WSJ. “It may have well have been a single individual.”

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