Multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks caused intermittent outages across several government websites in Taiwan yesterday, including the website of Taiwan’s Presidential office, hours before the arrival of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi became the first high-ranking US official to visit the country in 25 years and the trip has been widely trailed by global media.
Taiwan Presidential Office spokesperson Chang Tun-Han confirmed the DDoS attack on the office in a post on Facebook, and it states that the DDoS attack consisted of 200 times more traffic to the website than normal, and it was carried out by a group from outside Taiwan.
As per reports, the websites of Taiwan’s presidential office, foreign ministry, ministry of national defense and other government portals became briefly offline due to the attack.
According to foreign ministry statement, the websites were hit with up to 8.5 million traffic requests per minute from a “large number of IPs from China, Russia and other places.”
The scale of the attacks indicates patriotic hacktivists rather than Chinese state hackers are behind the raids.
According to Casey Ellis, founder and CTO at Bugcrowd, while the PRC is more than capable of this type of attack, DDoS is fairly unsophisticated and somewhat brutish, and it’s not a tool they are known to deploy.
Image Credits : NBC News
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