Digital attacks targeting Taiwanese government websites before US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s arrival in Taipei on Tuesday were likely launched, a cybersecurity research organization said. by active Chinese hackers, or “attackers,” said a cybersecurity research organization. The website of Taiwan’s presidential office was targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday and was down at one point, the office said in a statement.
The statement said access to the website was restored within about 20 minutes of the attack. Taiwanese government agencies were monitoring the situation in the face of “information warfare”, a spokesman later added.
A government portal site and Taiwan’s The State Department website was also taken offline and was inaccessible late Tuesday. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DDoS The attacks work by directing large volumes of internet traffic to targeted servers with a relatively sophisticated attempt to defeat them offline.
“These are uncoordinated, random, unethical attacks against malicious actors,” said Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research at the SANS Institute of Technology, a cybersecurity education and research organization. website that Chinese attackers use to deliver their messages.
“Usually it goes on for a few days, but they usually lose interest within a week. Many attacks are motivated by what is written in the Chinese press,” Ullrich adds.
The disruptive digital attack came from hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, tied to devices registered in China’s commercial internet space, Ullrich said.
A similar group of Chinese IP addresses has been scanning the Internet for low-level, exploitable vulnerabilities since Friday, he added, and doesn’t match normal activity, he added. made by Chinese government hackers.
© Thomson Reuters 2022
