Chinese Police Detain Four Internet Hackers

On May 19, China experienced widespread Internet outages after hackers took down major DNS servers in a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Chinese authorities now have the four hackers in custody following police investigations in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guandong provinces. The server in question was DNSPod, a Chinese DNS service provider and domain name registrar.

The motive for the attacks was apparently over a bitter rivalry between two illegal online gaming companies. DNSPod provides access to some of the competition’s gaming servers, and the suspects figured it was an easy way to redirect traffic to their own gaming sites. But the effects of the attacks were widespread, causing other servers to go down, including those of Baofeng, a popular Chinese video streaming service. Millions of users were denied service.

Nearly 300 million Internet users in China temporarily lost service, the worst outage since 2006, according to the the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. A DoS attack relies on unsecured computers to do its dirty work, infiltrating them and then using their Internet connections to send useless packets of data to a server until the server’s resources are completely used, denying real customers service.
Source: Top Tech News
Photo: Flickr