Potential cyberattack knocks out two-thirds of China’s .com domains

China suffered a major Internet outage yesterday, which is said to have knocked out access to two-thirds of the .com domain websites in the country. An unidentified issue caused a large number of websites to be unreachable for at least one hour. During that period, Internet users were redirected to a website owned by Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that works with the Falun Gong, a Buddhist group that offers VPN software to counteract China’s Internet censorship.

The cause of an Internet outage in China that rerouted millions of users to a U.S. website of a company which helps people get around Beijing’s censorship remained a mystery on Wednesday, but experts weighed the possibility of a cyberattack. Users were redirected to a site run by a company tied to the Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned in China which has been blamed for past hacking attacks. An official Xinhua news service report quoted Chinese security experts saying the outage could have been exploited by hackers, or could have been the result of a hacking attack.