China Experiences Massive Cyber-Attack

Yesterday's South China Morning Post reports:

China's domain name service suffered the largest attack ever on a mainland internet address server at the weekend, the central government said yesterday. 

The attack started very early on Sunday and was continuing yesterday afternoon, it said. More than eight million websites are registered with China's top-level country domain, .cn 

Li Xiaodong, executive director of the China Internet Network Information Centre, (CNNIC), which maintains the servers, said such an attack was unprecedented. 

To jam the Chinese servers, the attackers summoned traffic flow "far greater" than anything seen before, he said, without providing a figure on the volume. 

The first wave of attacks began at about midnight and lasted around two hours, interrupting services, CNNIC said. 

The second wave, at about 4am, turned out to be the biggest denial-of-service attack on Chinese domain name servers in history, slowing or killing connections to certain Chinese websites. A staff member at CNNIC told the Post that the attack was still going on yesterday afternoon.

The story indicated that officials did not know who had initiated the attack, but believed it was from a foreign (i.e., non-Chinese) group, but not a foreign government.