‘Cyberattack from China’ hit messaging app used by Hong Kong protesters at time of Wednesday’s demonstration, says app’s founder
- Pavel Durov, creator of Telegram app, said on Twitter that attack was mostly executed from IP addresses in China
- App is heavily used by Hong Kong protesters, with administrator of one 30,000-strong group arrested by police on Tuesday night
An encrypted messaging app used by protesters against the extradition bill was subject to a massive cyberattack originating in China on Wednesday as demonstrators gathered outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, according to the app’s creator.
Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, said in a tweet on Thursday morning that a powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack the company experienced on Wednesday was mostly executed from IP addresses in China. DDoS attacks cause servers to be overloaded with so-called junk requests, resulting in connection issues for certain users.
“IP addresses of the attacks mostly came from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong,” Durov wrote. “This case was not an exception.”
According to app data analytics firm, App Annie, Telegram had been one of Hong Kong’s most downloaded apps this week, coinciding with the large-scale protests by hundreds of thousands of opponents of the controversial extradition bill.
The bill, if passed, would allow fugitive transfers with jurisdictions Hong Kong does not now share extradition rights, including mainland China, where critics worry suspects would not be guaranteed a fair trial.