According to the foreign ministry of Taiwan, the websites of the ministry and presidential office were hit by multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, resulting in intermittent outages across several government websites. The attacks occurred after the arrival of senior US lawmaker Nancy Pelosi. The visit has angered Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its own territory. Pelosi reportedly met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen earlier this week to reiterate Washington’s support for the island nation.
Around the same time as the visit, it was reported that government websites belonging to Taiwan were hit by the DDoA attacks. Certain government portals were knocked offline, albeit briefly, due to the traffic. According to the foreign ministry, its site was hit with up to 8.5 million traffic requests per minute. The ministry reported that a large number of the IPs from which the traffic originated were located in China and Russia. The traffic meant that the sites faced more than 200 times the usual activity on the site.
