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DDoS attack chokes Chinese net surfing

Five-province traffic jam

Millions of internet users in China had trouble accessing websites earlier this week after an attack on a domain registrar in that country touched off a network traffic jam.

Internet service in at least five provinces was halted or severely slowed by a chain reaction that was touched off by a distributed denial-of-service attack on the domain name system servers of DNSPod, according to news reports.

Among the sites that relied on DNSPod was Baofeng.com, an extremely popular provider on streaming video. When users tried to visit the site, the massive number of unanswered DNS queries created yet more congestion on regional networks. The demand for Baofeng.com had the effect of amplifying the DDoS attack on the registrar's DNS servers.

People in Shanxi, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Hebei provinces all experienced network outages as a result of the attacks. Some sites such as Baidu, China's top search engine, were inaccessible for some users. Net access returned to normal several hours after the attacks began.

Additional coverage from IDG News, Shanghi Daily, and China Tech News are here, here and here. ®

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