Over the weekend, China’s Internet was attacked. Not only was it attacked, but government officials say it was the biggest denial-of-service hack in that nation’s history.
The only silver lightning is the timing the attack happened. It took place between 2am and 4am Sunday morning. The attack was aimed at a registry that allows ‘.cn’ sites. That’s kind of what ‘.com’ is to us in the US.?Thanks to?good?back up programs,?the outage only hit parts of websites for some users. In layman’s terms, it could have been a lot worse. By Monday morning, things online seemed to have gotten back to normal. According to Cloud Fare CEO Matthew Prince, there was a 32% drop in Chinese traffic and?domain use during this attack. Many experts believe the Chinese government have the power to carry out attacks, the believe the nation has little in defense against them.
It’s scary to believe one person can bring down much of a nation’s Web juice. It’s even scarier that a gov’t is good at starting attacks, but not very good at defending their own people against them. But I guess it could have been worse. But will it be next time? China is one of the fastest growing and most important economies in the world. If that can happen to them, what next? Are we in America just as venerable?