[ISN] Game server admins arrested for Chinese DNS attacks

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/08/game-server-admins-arrested-for-chinese-dns-attacks.ars

By Jacqui Cheng  
Ars Technica
August 28, 2009

A denial of service attack that took down Internet access in parts of 
China earlier this year has been attributed to an over-enthusiastic game 
provider trying to take down rivals. Police in Foshan, a city in 
Guangdong, have announced that they arrested four individuals for the 
attack, noting that they would go to trial sometime in the mysterious 
future.

The group was headed up by a 23-year-old factory worker with the surname 
Bing, according to the police announcement. Bing and his cohorts had set 
up a number of private servers for gamers to use, but weren't making 
much money because rivals had been engaging in distributed denial of 
service (DDos) attacks against them, constantly taking down the service. 
Bing was apparently angered by this and decided to drop 280,000 yuan 
(roughly US$41,000) to rent even more servers for the sole purpose of 
retaliating against his own attackers.

Unfortunately, these efforts were not very concentrated—Bing and the 
gang apparently launched their attack against every DNS server they 
could find belonging to DNSPod, a company that provides services to 
other gaming servers. The problem arose when numbers of users attempted 
to use the servers connected to DNSPod; their requests were denied and 
passed onto China Telecom, which couldn't handle all the requests. It 
ended up taking down the gaming service as well as numerous other 
websites that were connected to those DNS servers. According to DNSPod, 
even Baidu (the top search engine in China) became completely 
inaccessible in certain parts of China.

[...]


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