Chinese Hackers Attack DDoS On Taiwanese Government Web, Only Lasts 20 Minutes

JAKARTA - A digital attack on a Taiwanese government website ahead of the arrival of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taipei on Tuesday, August 2 was most likely launched by Chinese hacker activists, but not by their government. This statement comes from a cybersecurity research organization.

The website of Taiwan's presidential office was targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last Tuesday and was briefly out of service, the presidential spokesman said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

According to the spokesman, access to their website was successfully restored in about 20 minutes after the attack. Meanwhile, Taiwan's government agencies are monitoring the situation in the face of the "information war".

The government portal website and the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs website were also temporarily disabled last Tuesday.

In a statement, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the two websites had been hit by up to 8.5 million traffic requests per minute from "a large number of IPs from China, Russia and other places". In fact the attack was still ongoing, at the time the statement was made.

DDoS attacks work by redirecting high volumes of internet traffic to targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated attempt by so-called "hackers" to take them offline.

"This was an uncoordinated, random, demoralized attack on a website used by Chinese hackers to get their message across," said Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research at the SANS Technology Institute, a cybersecurity research and education organization.

"Usually it continues for a few days, but they often lose interest within a week. Many of the attacks were motivated by what was written in the Chinese press," added Ullrich.

"Disruptive digital flashes are coming from hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, associated with registered devices in China's commercial internet space," Ullrich said.

The group with similar Chinese IP addresses has been scanning the internet for easy-to-exploit low-level vulnerabilities since Friday, he added. This does not match the usual activities of Chinese government hackers.