14 DAY TRIAL // China has recently suffered an Internet outage and experts believe that it could have been caused by a cyberattack.
During the outage, users were redirected to a website of Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), which provides anti-censorship services specially designed for China. The company is also tied to the Falun Gong group, which was accused in the past of conducting cyberattacks.
Representatives of China’s Internet Network Information Center said that the outage was caused by a malfunction in the top-level domain name root servers.
Chinese security experts have told the Xinhua news agency that the incident could be a result of hacking. Another plausible scenario is that hackers exploited the outage.
The founder of DIT, Bill Xia, has told Reuters that the Chinese government might have mistakenly used its Internet censorship system to block all websites, instead of just the sites it usually bans.
Xia believes that the Domain Name Service (DNS) has been hijacked, since even if they tried to visit sites that didn’t exist, users were redirected to his organization’s website.
Xia denies that the Falun Gong hackers are responsible for the outage, but he doesn’t know why users were redirected to his company’s website.