Telegram again suffers a DDoS attack in China

Before getting into what the news itself is, we are going to explain to you what that 'DDoS attack' is that you have read in the headline and that you may not know what it is. A DDoS attack (the acronym for 'Distributed Denial of Service) has the purpose of rendering a particular server useless by saturating the bandwidth or exhausting the system resources that make it work. During the course of a DDoS attack, a multitude of requests are sent to the same site, at the same time, from different points on the network.Thus, the website is disabled, with all that this entails for the company that owns it.

Telegram and censorship in China

Well, the Telegram messaging application is suffering a DDoS attack in China, a country whose capital is attending a massive demonstration against a new law that would subject the city to abrutal repression by the government And Telegram has become an essential tool for the protesters, as it is an encrypted service and with greater security measures than others such as WhatsApp. The attack began yesterday at about 5 pm on Wednesday, Hong Kong time. An attack, moreover, that not only affected the Chinese country, as can be read in the official tweet issued by the company itself.

We're currently experiencing a powerful DDoS attack, Telegram users in the Americas and some users from other countries may experience connection issues.

- Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019

Telegram's servers thus began to receive tons of junk requests, preventing the service from processing the legitimate ones. The company itself explains the attack using a curious simile:

“Imagine that an army of lemmings has just jumped the line at McDonald's in front of you and each one is ordering a whopper. The server is busy telling the lemmings that they came to the wrong place, but there are so many that the server can't even see you to try to take your order»

A series of attacks coming from afar

Apparently, it is common for these attacks to coincide with movements and marches in favor of human rights in the Asian country. Four years ago, for example, China began a crackdown on lawyers handling cases involving human rights.The web version of Telegram was blocked on servers in various cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, and Yunnan. According to the state-run China Daily newspaper, these lawyers used the Telegram app to attack the country's government.

The lawyers used Telegram's 'secret chat' function, through which messages self-destruct after a while, as happens with Instagram Stories, and thus leave no trace or any information that can serve as evidence against the participants in the conversation.

Other DDoS attacks against Telegram may have originated from competing applications such as Line or Kakao Talk In 2014, Telegram received a massive exodus of Korean users to their application due to the censorship they suffered, preventing them from communicating freely. In the end, all DDoS attacks have the same goal: censorship.

Telegram CEO has no doubts about the repressive nature of these DDoS attacks:

“Most of the attacks correspond to IP addresses located in China. All the DDoS attacks in which the sending of garbage has been extreme (200-400 GB per second) coincided, in time, with demonstrations in China against the state's repression of its citizens.»