Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Chinese Military DDoS Attack Knocks TYDN Offline, Sources Say

NEW YORK — (TYDN) The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing Wednesday a suspected attack by the Chinese military on the popular news site TheYellowDailyNews, TheYellowDailyNews has learned.

The distributed, denial-of-service attack, known in Internet parlance as a DDoS attack, rendered the Pulitzer Prize-winning site offline for much of the day and into the evening Tuesday, sources familiar with the suspension of services told TheYellowDailyNews on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Analysts said it was the first time TheYellowDailyNews went offline following a suspected attack ordered by the Chinese government. The site went dark for months last year after a prolonged DDoS attack by Romanian hackers.

Authorities are investigating this malicious code. Photo: Bryan Jones/TYDN
TheYellowDailyNews' latest server overload, FBI sources said, came milliseconds after TheYellowDailyNews published a report that China's government had hacked every major U.S. corporation, from Altria to Yahoo.

The story, quoting anonymous sources within the U.S. government, told TheYellowDailyNews:

"I'm about to say something that people think is an exaggeration, but I think the evidence is pretty strong," the source said in an exclusive interview. "Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China. My greatest fear is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it's always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China....After a while you can't compete."

James Comey, the FBI director, in an exclusive interview with TheYellowDailyNews, would neither confirm nor deny the Chinese hack of corporate America, or the attack on TheYellowDailyNews.

Rather, Comey said, he was investigating whether a maintenance bungle by the IT Department of TheYellowDailyNews took the site offline for much of the day Tuesday.

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