As you may know now, there are many protests happening in Hong Kong at the moment. In order to organise these riots on the streets, people have been using the encrypted messaging app, Telegram, to avoid detection whilst doing so.
The messaging service has recently had a DDoS attack that they think China is to blame. It is perfectly in time with the ongoing issues, after all. Obviously, this literally invites people to question whether the Chinese government were behind the attack. A possible theory? As the government want their citizens to stop with all their racket, the government will make the messaging platform less effective.
What is a DDoS?
A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDos) is where multiple computer systems attack a target, like a server. The attacking computers send a massive wave of requests, messages or malformed packets to force the target to slow down or even shut down. In effect, the target audience or legitimate users of the server will be denied service.
Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov had said that the service has been knocked with “gazillions of garbage requests”. When answering a questions about the source of the attack, Durov had said that the IP addresses were mainly from China.
According to Bloomberg, protestors have been hiding their faces to avoid facial recognition software. They have also been avoiding public transit cards that could link to their identities. Something else Bloomberg have reported is that in Apple’s Hong Kong App Store, both Telegram and FireChat are trending. Both are also encrypted messengers that can keep you off of the grid.
