DDoS attack on Telegram connected to China's political protest. (Image via: GBHackers on Security)

Cyber-Attack Hits Telegram Connected to China's Extradition Protest

The application allows people to send encrypted messages, videos, photos, and it can also used for creating “channels” and groups for a large number of people up to 200.000. The benefit of this application makes million of people choose it to avoid surveillance by authorities. Therefore, Telegram is a useful tool to unite people with the same vision from all over the world, from drug dealers to human rights activists. Recently, Telegram got a problem from their security and flexibility as an application.

The CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, announced through Twitter on Thursday (June 13) that Telegram got hit by cyber-attack. It was a powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attack involves a hacker overwhelming a target’s servers by creating a large number of junk requests. He said, the junk requests mostly came from China. "IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong. This case was not an exception,” Durov wrote on Twitter.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, the role of the Telegram platform in the protests took a spotlight when the administrator of a Telegram group was arrested for conspiracy to commit public nuisance on Tuesday night. Aside from Telegram, the protester also use Whatsapp and Signal as a platform to organize their activities. The current protests were based on fears that the proposed law would allow extraditions to China and let people get exposed to the mainland's politicised justice system.

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/telegram-says-whopper-ddos-attack-launched-mostly-from-china/