Telegram founder Pavel Durov said a massive cyber-attack on his messaging service originated in China, raising questions about whether Beijing tried to disrupt a protest involving hundreds of thousands that erupted on the streets of Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
The encrypted messaging app said it experienced a powerful distributed denial of service attack after \u201cgarbage requests\u201d flooded its servers and disrupted legitimate communications. Most of those queries came from Chinese internet protocol addresses, founder Pavel Durov said in a subsequent Twitter post.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis case was not an exception,\u201d he tweeted without elaborating.<\/p>\n
Hong Kong is in the throes of political unrest as the Beijing-backed government attempts to force through controversial legislation that would for the first time allow extraditions to China, which protesters fear could be used to squelch government opposition. That proposal has ignited a widespread outcry, sending hundreds of thousands of protesters into the city\u2019s streets and triggering violent clashes when demonstrators stormed the legislative chamber Wednesday.<\/p>\n
IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb\/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on @telegram). This case was not an exception.<\/p>\n
Hong Kong protesters have grown increasingly concerned about legal repercussions as Beijing tightens its influence over the former British colony and the local government prosecutes demonstrators. They\u2019ve relied on encrypted services to avoid detection. Telegram and Firechat — a peer-to-peer messaging service that works with or without internet access — are among the top trending apps in Hong Kong\u2019s Apple store.<\/p>\n
Many protesters masked their faces to avoid facial recognition and avoided using public transit cards that can be voluntarily linked to their identities. An administrator of a large local Telegram group was arrested Tuesday for allegedly conspiring to commit a public nuisance, the South China Morning Post reported.<\/p>\n
Hong Kong\u2019s Legislative Council suspended a review of the bill for a second day Thursday amid the continued threat of protests. The city\u2019s leader, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, is seeking to pass the legislation by the end of the current legislative session in July.<\/p>\n
Telegram was created by Durov, a Russian entrepreneur known for his advocacy of internet freedoms. Russia began implementing a ban on Telegram in April after the messaging service refused to hand over encryption keys to security services. Durov didn\u2019t respond to a message posted on his private Telegram channel Thursday.<\/p>\n
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said a massive cyber-attack on his messaging service originated in China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":256675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[23753],"class_list":["post-310105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-telegram"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310107,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310105\/revisions\/310107"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}