[mahranch]

I knew it would be S.Korea. The company I used to work for, at the time I left, was dealing with some particularly spiteful individuals from S.Korea who have been DDoSing their gaming platform and their separate video host. This was happening off and on for about 12 months. Interestingly enough, each attack was committed by completely different individual and were unrelated. In one attack where the guy was caught (I think they caught all but 2 of the attackers), he claimed he ran the DDoS because he didn't like the fact that there was a Japanese pop music video being hosted on the video site. This wasn't a young kid either, the guy was 33 and had a full time job at some advertising company.

[dylz]

This more or less reflects my stance on SK too. I ran a reasonably large APAC/SEA esports-related site for a while, competing sites in SK often attempted to attack it (and outright told me as such, to get out of korea). It's strange and I really have no idea why.

[cpncrunch]

We had a 9Gbps attack from SK earlier in the year. I have no idea why we were targeted, but my best guess is that a user in SK got upset at some user-generated content and decided to DDoS the site rather than report it to us. Weird.

Anyway, we decided to move to OVH, and haven't had any problem since. We did get an email about an attack being mitigated a few months ago (which didn't cause any outage at all), and since then the trolls have realised that we can't be DDoSed any more :)

[kijin]

There are assholes in every country.

It's easier for assholes in some countries to launch DDoS attacks than it is for assholes in other countries.

With the one of the world's largest userbases of outdated IE with tons of ActiveX plugins, South Korea sure is a nice place to run a botnet.

On the other hand, most of the ISPs mentioned in the article are not Korean, so maybe it's a bit more complicated.

[brobinson]

Could this be a state-sponsored attack? Or an attack by nationalists who are against people bypassing the anti-everything-speech-related laws?

[kijin]

An attack sponsored by the South Korean government sounds unlikely. South Korea isn't exactly a bastion of free speech, but it isn't China, either.

If by "nationalists" you mean the notorious online community known as ilbe, that's definitely possible. They're a weird amalgam of political ideology and lulz, basically the neocon counterpart to /b/.

But it could just as well have been a shady competitor who got pissed off with Telegram for whatever reason. The social networking market in Korea is cutthroat. Almost everyone treats it as a zero-sum game where you have to destroy all the others in order to succeed. Maybe this competitor was planning to launch what it considered a killer feature and Telegram launched it first. Stickers?

[brobinson]

Interesting, I hadn't heard of "iibe". Here's an article I found in case anyone else is interested: http://www.koreabang.com/2012/features/netizen-explains-root...

[Laforet]

The linked post seems to point blame at LINE. Stickers (large animated emoticons) are a major source of revenue for LINE; if Telegram were to offer it for free then it will really hit their bottom line.

[brobinson]

The majority of LINE users are in Japan and Taiwan. It's the biggest program in both of those countries. LINE is owned by a Korean company, though.