Telegram the popular cross-platform messenger faced a series of DDoS attacks, twice in a row for two days, causing network issues to users around the globe.
On Saturday, Telegram users around the globe reported problems connecting with the App. After many user complaints, it came to the notice of the Telegram network administrator. Upon investigating it was found that Telegram was hit by large scale DDoS attack which caused the server to go down.
What is a DDoS attack?
A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is an attempt to make the service from a network unavailable by sending multiple get requests. In this method hackers commonly use botnets to flood the server with multiple get requests in minimum time, which the servers can’t cope up with, causing data overload and service disruption.
The Telegram tweeted later confirming the attack, a DDoS, apparently in 10’s of Gigabytes.
A DDoS attack on Telegram in progress, tens of Gigabit\sec. Users in some countries may have connection issues. We’re working on it, folks!
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) September 27, 2014
One of the founders of the Telegram Messenger, Pavel Durov said on Twitter that they had never encountered a attack of this scale (50-60 GB/s). The Telegram engineers sorted the issue and the App service started working normally. But unfortunately, the hackers were back with vengeance on Sunday. Today, Telegram was hit by a another wave of DDoS attack, much more powerful than the last one. The company said they were facing a three time stronger DDoS attack this time and the attack may be about ~150GB/s in size.
Detecting a 150+ Gbit/s DDoS now, an attack three times as large as yesterday’s.
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) September 28, 2014
The DDOS attack has become more and more common these days for the cyber criminals and hactivists, but what is still unknown is that why the hackers targeted the Telegram. Was it any kind of dispute between the hackers and the company or was it a competitior’s plan, or simply a Ransom demand.
