Update | Cyberattackers brought down Apple Daily website with 40 million hits every second
Cyberattackers brought down Apple Daily's website with 40 million hits a second, the paper revealed today, while an internet expert estimated more than 10,000 computers would have been used.
A cyberattack on Apple Daily's website saw more than 40 million enquiries sent to the site per second during its peak, bringing the system down and blocking normal web users from accessing pages for several hours, the company revealed today.
In a front page story the company blamed the attack on Beijing and said its vast scale would have required several thousands computers running in tandem.
The 'denial-of'service' (DDoS) attack is a commonly used tool by cyberattackers who want to bring down websites.
Often they will harness a network of machines under their control to send repeated requests to a site simultaneously, the volume of which far exceeds the capacity the site's servers can cope with. This results in part of the infrastructure failing, which causes the site to become unavailable to regular users.
Lento Yip Yuk-fai, chairman of the Internet Service Providers' Association, told Apple Daily: “An attack of such a scale would require more than 10,000 computers to launch. It was unlikely to have been launched by ordinary hackers.” He said the instigators would have been "world class" hackers.
Next Media chairman Jimmy Lai Chi-ying laid the blame for Wednesday's attack squarely at Beijing's door.