Protesters in Hong Kong on June 12 rallying against Chinese extradition. (Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)
In the midst of widespread protests in Hong Kong over a bill that would allow extraditions to mainland China, encrypted messaging app Telegram said it was hit with a massive DDoS attack originating from Chinese IP addresses.
Organised by the Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), more than a million protesters have rallied this week against a bill that would allow the semi-independent Hong Kong government to detain and transfer those charged with a specific list of crimes to the Chinese mainland. The bill excludes political charges, but critics and protesters argue that the extradition bill would give the Chinese government an excuse to arrest and extradite virtually anyone under the guise of legality.
Protesters succeeded in delaying debate on the bill temporarily amid arrests and dozens of injuries, as Hong Kong police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds.
During yesterday's protest, Telegram said it was hit was a large distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack flooding its servers. The app was hit with a similar attack in 2015 during a Chinese crackdown on human rights lawyers.
The company's Twitter account took the opportunity to give a lesson on how DDoS attacks work using a rather odd collection of analogies where it confused McDonald's and Burger King and invoked a zombie apocalypse.
A DDoS is a "Distributed Denial of Service attack": your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald's in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper. (1/2) — Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019
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To generate these garbage requests, bad guys use "botnets" made up of computers of unsuspecting users which were infected with malware at some point in the past. This makes a DDoS similar to the zombie apocalypse: one of the whopper lemmings just might be your grandpa. — Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov responded on Twitter that the IP addresses were "coming mostly from China" and coincided with the Hong Kong protests. Telegram said that the attack has subsided as of Wednesday night, Hong Kong time.