Chinese hackers attack National Taiwan University's website; warn of more cyber-strikes

With Chinese military drills taking place in the background, Taiwan has seen an increase in cyberattacks, with National Taiwan University (NTU) being the most recent victim. CNA reported, according to the most recent response from the school, hackers also infiltrated the Office of Academic Affairs. The University has urgently activated the emergency response procedures, according to the R&D Office's homepage.

According to the media agency, when visiting the website, the words "There is only one China in the world" appear.

NTU, a renowned university in Taiwan, declared that it had taken action to address the breaches and that services for the two websites would be temporarily suspended while the problems were fixed. It is worth mentioning here that nineteen hours after US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on the August 2, the Taiwan government and private organisations, including 7-ELEVEN unified supermarket, Taiwan Railway, and Kaohsiung City Environmental Protection Bureau, were attacked by hackers.

Taiwan's Foreign Ministry's website crashed for a few hours on August 2, 4 & 5

From August 5 to August 6, Chinese hackers covered a Kaohsiung government website with a China flag image for more than ten hours, according to Taiwan News. It was revealed on the morning of August 5 that the website of Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs crashed for a few hours on August 2, 4, and 5. The ministry explained that there was a brute force attempt to crash the server, with up to 17 million access attempts per minute from numerous Chinese and Russian IP addresses.

According to people familiar with the situation, central government agencies have been ordered to monitor websites and report problems up the chain of command to the Cabinet every hour from August 5 to August 8. APT27, a Chinese hacker group, announced in a YouTube video that it would conduct "a special cyber operation" against Taiwan on August 3 by attempting to compromise its infrastructure and government services.

The group took responsibility for the series of attacks in the most recent video, which was made public on August 7, and issued a warning that more attacks should be anticipated. The National Police Agency stated in a press release on August 8 that since August 5, more stringent information security measures have been put in place in response to the warning.  

Image: AP/Pixabay