Corporate Warfare on the Internet

Posted on September 12, 2008
Filed Under China Hackers, China Internet |

POLICE in Shandong Province have caught three men allegedly responsible for a citywide Internet breakdown in Weifang in July, according to xinhuanet.com.

…The report did not say when the breakdown occurred but said in July police received an alert from the Weifang Branch of the China Netcom Group, which serves about 90 percent of the internet users in the city. The company complained that hackers had been attacking its network continuously, causing a two-day breakdown.

More than 400,000 internet users were affected. The city’s government departments, hospitals and schools were affected, the report said.

A special task force was set up and officers went to Beijing, Tianjin and other provinces before they finally arrested the three men and confiscated laptops and computers.

Two of the men were managers of a local logistics company who had hired the third man to attack the Website of a rival logistics company.

However that company’s Website was set up in the core computer room of the Weifang branch of China Netcom Group and the hacker’s attack brought the entire city’s network down.

Sounds like a distributed denial of service attack. That the branch office of China Netcom was unable to filter out the attacks (either based on the target or on the traffic) or identify the source IP addresses and contact the relevant ISP(s) is a pretty damning performance. That they host websites at the core of their network rather than a server farm network is even worse.

Oh, and the next time someone goes out and hires a hacker to attack a rival’s website, they might want to make sure the hacker doesn’t bring the whole local network down. The idiots who put the contract out probably lost their access as well - not to mention all their customers’ access.