DDoS Attack Pulls Plug on Chinese Anti-Communist Party

It’s not about money; it’s simply cyber-warfare

By Bogdan BOTEZATU | Published on 9th March 2011, 13:00 EET | 237 reads | Readers' opinions: 0

If you happen to have signed up for a webhosting account with Codero, then you probably noticed that your website hasn't been up for a while. The reason is a massive distributed denial-of-service attack launched against the Codero infrastructure and which appears to have originated in China. The final target of the attack is a Chinese website that is notorious for its anti-communist stance and which was hosted with the company, Codero officials stated.

  

According to Ryan Elledge, chief operating officer at Codero, the DDoS attack rendered a couple of thousands of websites hosted with the company offline for the morning, although they were not the intended targets.

The Chinese attack was also launched against three different hosting companies that provide redundancy services for the above-mentioned anti-communist website.

 

We are experiencing network issues affecting part of our PHX data center," the company posted on its Twitter page. "Engineers are working with upstream providers." However, closer inspection revealed that the issue was not related to a problem with the upstream carrier for Codero traffic, but rather by an enormous amount of packets sent to the company's datacenter in Phoenix.

 

 "We were receiving more than 1.5 million packets per second in the attack. It paralyzed our core routers, and our upstream providers were unable to pinpoint where the target IPs were," revealed Elledge.

 

Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks have become the favorite means of protest against free speech around the web. Last year, one of the most important attacks of this kind was launched against a multitude of payment processing companies such as Moneybookers and Visa after they have cut down support for the financial operations of Wikileaks.

 

The Russian government also relied on DDoS attacks to take offline the Blogger and Youtube accounts of Georgian blogger Cyxymu in August 2009. This attack was extended to Facebook and Twitter in order to cut down communication between the anti-Russian journalist and the rest of its readers.