Game site rivalry took down Internet across China
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A denial of service attack launched by an online gaming website against a competitor earlier this year caused national outages, say Chinese authorities
Four employees of an online gaming company in China have been arrested after a denial of service attack they allegedly launched against a rival site earlier this year resulted in Internet outages in large parts of the country.
Authorities say that having suffered numerous denial of service attacks from rivals itself, the company decided to launch an attack on a location domain name server (DNS) registrar DNSPod, which served many of its competitors.
When DNSPod’s servers were overwhelmed, it began routing traffic to China Telecom’s servers, whose subsequent failure caused Internet outages in six different provinces of the country.
According to Interfax China, a business news and research organisation, the country’s online gaming industry is expected to reach $2.7 billion next year. The scale of popular involvement in online games can be staggering; two of the most popular games in recent times, Fantasy Westward Journey and Zhengtu Online, have both reached peaks of over 1.5 million users playing at one time.
But questionable competitive practices such as the above story mean that this popularity may threaten the integrity of the Internet infrastructure in China, causing problems for businesses that operate in or outsource to the country.
