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A planned cyber-attack against CNN.com fizzled over the weekend, but The Sports Network did not survive the DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) assault by Chinese hackers.
At 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning, The Sports Network home page carried this note:
““The Sports Network website and other major news sites have been hacked by a political entity from China, and as a result are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.”“
TechCrunch has a screenshot of the defaced site, which mentions the China/Tibet political situation.
The Sports Network takedown follows a public threat by Chinese hacker groups to attack CNN.com.
According to Arbor Networks researcher Jose Nazario, the CNN.com attacks did materialize but didn’t seem to disrupt the site’s operation:
“Most of the attacks were TCP SYN floods (still popular after all these years), targeting three different CNN websites. Attack intensity was pretty small on average, with the peak attack intensity still a modest (by global attack standards) 100 Mbps.“
Attacks against CNN by type over the weekend.
The raw details of the CNN.com attack:
Attack bandwidth — peak: 100 Mbps, average: 20 Mbps Attack duration — peak: 30 minutes, average: under 15 minutes Attack targets — www2.cnn.com, www3.cnn.com, edition.cnn.com