New Delhi: 

Amid heightened tensions with India, China opened yet

another front by targeting government website and banking systems
through sustained DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks. The attack
was successfully thwarted and as per the media reports, the attack was
traced to the Chinese city of Chengdu.
Chengdu is the headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398,
China’s primary covert cyberwarfare unit responsible for cyber-attack on
several corporations and government entities across the world since 2006.
According to a report by HT, attacks began on Tuesday and continued
through Wednesday.
China has been working on developing its cyberspace doctrine since
the 1990s
According to Information Warfare Monitor 2009 report ‘Tracking GhostNet:
Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network’, since the late 1990S, China has
been working on developing its cyberspace doctrine and capabilities as
part of its military modernization programme.
“The Chinese doctrine of ‘active defence,’ which is the belief that China
must be ready to respond to aggression immediately, places an emphasis
on the development of cyber warfare capabilities,” the report says.
It further accused the Chinese hackers of “data theft from foreign
government computers and commercial and financial institutions” and
reported that they had infiltrated government computers in the United
States, Britain, France, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan.
In May 2014, a US Federal grand jury indicted five 61398 officers for theft
of confidential business information and intellectual property from US
commercial firms and planting malware in their computers.
What are DDOS attacks?
Norton describes a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as “one of
the most powerful weapons on the internet” when hackers flood a network
by with artificial traffic consisting of “incoming messages, requests for
connections, or fake packets.”
The aim of this attack is to overwhelm the website with heavy traffic more
than the server or the network can accommodate thereby rendering the
website inoperable.