The instant messaging service Telegram suffered a denial of service (DoS) attack this Wednesday; through Twitter, the company unveiled the incident, mentioning that users might experience some connection problems when using the service. According to web application security experts, the company’s CEO has pointed to the Chinese government as responsible for the incident.
Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, said
that the saturation in traffic originated mainly in IP addresses of China,
ensuring that the DoS attack was deployed by a State actor to obstruct
communication between the inhabitants of Hong Kong, who have organized mass
protests through Telegram.
The last few days, hundreds of thousands of people
have taken the streets of Hong Kong to protest against the plans of the Chinese
government to allow extraditions from the city, which serves as a special
administrative region, with its own rights and a market economy isolated from
the rest of China.
Some web application security experts have
supported Durov’s statements on the use of Telegram to mobilize people, as this
is a service with a special focus on the privacy of users whose configurations
make it difficult to Government espionage campaigns. According to reports from
some firms, Telegram and FireChat, which works in a similar way, are the most
recently downloaded apps at the Apple store in Hong Kong.
However, the renowned expert on web application
security Richard Hummel points out that it is not easy to attribute these
attacks to the Chinese government; “In a DoS
attack, hackers usually falsify the IP addresses used to hide their
infrastructure, this happened in the attack on Telegram”, the expert says.
According to the experts from the International
Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) Telegram completely reestablished its
service during the last hours of Wednesday, mentioning that an enormous number
of misconfigured devices were used to launch attacks to a specific IP address.
