The revenge of Bing

Bing the man from China, not Bing the Microsoft search engine. The Strategy Page tells the curious story of how a Chinese ISP operator decided to wage cyberwar on his competitors in retaliation for some dirty deed done to him. He did it so successfully that he crashed the Internet in parts of Southern China, earning him the ire of the Chinese authorities, but his unexpected success has piqued the curiosity of cyber-warriors, who want to know how Mr. Bing accomplished on a shoestring budget what many better endowed organizations would not dream of attempting.

My guess is that Bing succeeded because he knew the system that he was attacking — perhaps not from a rigorous, mathematical, formal point of view — in a practical way. Bing focused his resources on the weakest point of the Chinese Internet and brought it down. See the key excerpts, after the Read More.

• Strategy Page — Information Warfare: Bing The Avenger Ravages South China
  • September 2, 2009: Cyber War experts are scrambling to obtain more details on a recent (last June) incident in southern China. There, Internet service over wide areas of the region was unavailable, or severely interrupted, for hours. China has over 300 million Internet users, and a pretty robust Internet. But an angry (at a competitor who had DDOSed his servers) game provider named Bing (no relation to the Microsoft search service), spent $40,000 to hire lots of botnets to shut down their rivals, and gain a bit of revenge.
  • Renting botnets for DDOS attacks means buying access to hundreds, or thousands, of home and business PCs that have had special software secretly (and illegally) installed
  • But Mr. Bing decided to use a slightly different tactic. He had his botnets DDOS the DNS servers that belonged to the DNSPod company, which provided Internet services for Bing’s rivals.
  • By the time Mr. Bing and his three partners turned off their DDOS assault, it was too late. The Internet community in southern China was in an uproar.
  • What Bing and his buddies did was the sort of thing that could be used as an Internet weapon, in wartime. The cyber-generals want to know exactly how it was done.

Bing there, done that.

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