Formosa Television (FTV) reported an intensive series of cyberattacks while China’s People’s Liberation Army conducted live-fire military exercises, the National Communications Commission said yesterday.
The television station was the only broadcast media in Taiwan to report a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, Department of Infrastructure and Cybersecurity Deputy Director Wu Ming-ren (吳銘仁) said, adding that the network reported information security breaches on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and yesterday.
“The cyberattacks have mainly affected FTV’s Web site and its live broadcast over YouTube,” Wu said. “The YouTube content was changed by hackers on Saturday.”
The TV station said that its live online content was changed to pro-China messages, but its terrestrial and cable channels were uninterrupted.
The volume of the cyberattacks varied from 3 to 10 megabits per second, he said, adding that they had eased by yesterday. There are two types of DDoS attack, Wu said.
One is to block access to a Web site by using Internet protocol packets to cause severe bandwidth congestion and the other is to overwhelm a Web site by drastically increasing the number of user applications linked to it, he said.
