Taiwan Government Sites Crippled by a Sudden DDoS Attack

Numerous DDoS attacks have caused intermittent outages across several government websites in Taiwan yesterday following the much-publicized arrival of a senior US lawmaker.

This visit by a US politician, and certainly does not break any international law or bilateral agreement, the visit has angered Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its own.

Pelosi reportedly met Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and reiterated Washington’s support for the democratic island nation of 24 million. Same time, reports suggested the websites of Taiwan’s presidential office, the foreign ministry, and other government portals were knocked briefly offline after being flooded with traffic.

A foreign ministry statement seen by Reuters claimed that the websites of the ministry and the presidential office were hit with up to 8.5 million traffic requests per minute from many IPs from China, Russia, and other places. The attack had funneled 200 times more traffic than usual to the site. However, it was back up and running just 20 minutes later, it added.

The scale of the attacks indicates patriotic hacktivists rather than Chinese state hackers are behind the raids. The nationalist feelings in the country since Xi Ping came to power in 2012, in a bid to cement the rule of the Communist Party and continue China’s ascent.

These efforts are aided by a formidable online censorship apparatus that scrubs any dissenting opinion from the internet in China, usually leaving only pro-party and nationalist rhetoric standing.