Taiwan hit with cyber attacks during Pelosi's visit

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan last week sparked cyber attacks against government websites as well as corporations in Taiwan.

"We also saw cyber attacks hit 7-Eleven. We're still getting reports of what's going on, but a lot of these attacks were DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service, which means hackers flood these sites with traffic so they simply can't function," said cybersecurity expert Leeza Garber to The National Desk's Jan Jeffcoat. "A lot of it took down operation, some of it in 7-Eleven showed messages supporting China. It looks like a lot of the IP addresses originated from Russia and China."

In some branches of 7-Eleven convenience stores in Taiwan, television screens behind cashiers displayed the words "Warmonger Pelosi, get out of Taiwan!"

According to a Facebook translation of a message from Taiwan’s presidential office, a 200-fold increase in weekday traffic knocked the office’s site offline for 20 minutes last week. Other sites in Taiwan also went down, including those belonging to the Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry and its largest airport, Taoyuan International. The attacks were likely launched by Chinese activist hackers rather than the Chinese government, according to SANS Technology Institute, a cybersecurity education and research organization.

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