Back in May, China experienced a pretty large-scale internet outtage, and police have recently uncovered just what happened. A 23-year old cotton factory worker had been renting some rack space to run some private game servers, and he and his competitors got into a bit of a back and forth of attacking each others’ equipment. Ultimately, the man rented enough server power to launch a DDoS attack against his rival, which took down the domain registrar DNSPod. This made it so that a lot of URLs could not be resolved into IP addresses, thus shutting down the internet for a lot of people.

I think that this was probably a one-time event, though it’d be far more interesting if it weren’t. What if China had a whole mess of people running illegal services off their own servers, and all of them were in a constant cyber battle with each other to try and be the dominant illegal service provider? It sounds like an online mafia to me. It seems more likely that what I just described isn’t the case, but who knows? After all, it is China.