China has been hit by the “largest ever” attack on its Internet structure, crashing the country’s .cn servers, according to a government-linked agency.<\/p>\n
The national domain name resolution service came under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for around two hours early on Sunday, the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Domain name resolution is a key part of how the Internet works, converting a website name into a set of digits — the IP address — that computers can recognise. The service in China focuses on websites with the .cn extension.<\/p>\n
DDoS attacks are attempts to overload a server with a huge number of requests, so that it interrupts or suspends its functions.<\/p>\n
A second wave of the assault in China two hours later grew into “the biggest of its kind ever”, CNNIC said, without giving any indication of who might have been responsible.<\/p>\n
“The resolution of some websites was affected, leading visits to become slow or interrupted.”<\/p>\n
Washington has repeatedly accused China of waging hacking attacks on the websites of US government agencies and businesses.<\/p>\n
But Beijing has denied the accusations, saying China itself is a victim of Internet attacks.<\/p>\n
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