Telegram Accuses China Of DDoS Attacks During Hongkong Protests

Instant messaging app Telegram recently has experienced a large-scale cyber attack during Hongkong protests. The app’s founder, Pavel Durov said the platform was distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, which used a huge volume of traffic to disrupt the service. Investigating the reasons behind, he further stated that IP addresses mostly came from China, citing examples about the past state actor-sized incidences.

Why China attacked Telegram? 

Not the whole Telegram users, the attack might almost entirely aim at the protesters joining in Hongkong demonstrations. Some months ago, the city’s government introduced a new law which allows the extradition of people to mainland China. Following that, lots of Hongkong residents held protests to raise their voice against the proposed change, a majority of them are college-aged and digitally savvy.

Hongkong residents object to extradition law.

According to protesters, China owns a very closed court system which is tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Therefore, such change might damage the high-level autonomy of Hong Kong, while strengthens Beijing’s authority over the state’s civil liberties.

In organizing the demonstrations, Telegram has become one of the most perfect networking tools to communicate among participants due to its encrypted feature. Protesters used the app to share safety tips, muster their ranks, and importantly hide their identities from the authorities. However, the Hong Kong government still made their own moves by tracking digital footprints of residents, and China attempted to disrupt communication services like Telegram. Durov said the attack targeting at Telegram coincided with Hong Kong protests, most of the attackers from China.

How did this happen? 

In the case of Telegram, the app’s servers were temporarily broken down due to requests from a large coordinated network of computers. With such distributed traffic, it is much more difficult for the victim to stop the attack.

Nonetheless, on the same day of the attack, Telegram announced they had stabilized it and assured users that personal data was safe.