The population is demonstrating massively these days in Hong Kong before the possible approval of the law of extracición to Mainland China. Organizing part of the protests through Telegram, the platform claims to be under a great attack of with Chinese DDOS service.
Pavel Durov, CEO of the Telegram messaging service, has accused the Chinese authorities of being behind a denial of service attack ( DDoS) on his platform. The company warns its users in America and other parts of the world that “they might experience connection problems.”
The attack coincides, again according to Durov, with the current cycle of protests in Hong Kong and that they would be partially coordinated through this platform. It is something that has happened “historically“, in “all DDoS attacks on a state scale“, as stated by the Russian programmer.
“The IP addresses come mainly from China. Historically, all the DDoS at the state scale (200-400 Gb / s of trash) that we have experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated in Telegram) exception.”
It would not be the first time that Telegram serves as a communication channel outside the control of official governments. A few years ago, it received strong criticism of its role as an intermediary between the communications of ISIS itself.
The origin of the attack comes from a network of bots, automatic tools that infect legitimate accounts and that are capable of saturating the servers that support services such as applications through a huge number of illegitimate requests.
Despite the attack, Telegram assured that “the situation seems to have stabilized“, as well as due to the nature of the attack, which only affects the functioning of the servers, the data of the users are safe.
Telegram is one of the most used tools in Hong Kong to organize protests for the options it offers regarding security, end-to-end encryption of conversations and the function of “self-destruction” of the messages sent and received.
