Early Sunday morning, part of the Chinese Internet went down in what the government is calling the largest denial-of-service attack it has ever faced. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, the attack began at 2 a.m. Sunday morning and was followed by an even more intense attack at 4 a.m. The attack was aimed at the registry that allows users to access sites with the extension “.cn,”. As originally reported by the Wall Street Journal, the attack is perhaps more an indicator of just how susceptible the global Internet infrastructure is to these types of attacks.

China has one of the most sophisticated filtering systems in the world, period. Furthermore, China’s government is rated by analysts as having one of the highest abilities to carry out cyber attacks. Despite both of these points, China is not capable of defending itself from an attack.

DOS (Denial of Service) or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are the single largest threat to our Internet and the Internet of Things. The more our world becomes connected and dependent on the Internet, the more opportunities there are to thwart everyday lifestyle necessities in our IoT. Here are some of the more recent examples:

Latest DOS attacks around the world

• Anonymous Demands Recognition of DDoS as a Legal Form of Protest

We all know that how annoying DDoS is, and just how inconvenient it becomes to access a much-needed site. While we may curse the people behind DDoS attacks, the renowned hacktivist Anonymous group is looking to get such attacks the status of legal protest.

According to Anonymous, DDoS is done to send a message to the affected party, which is why they’ve petitioned the Obama administration to recognize DDoS as a legal form of protest. In the petition, the Anonymous group also demanded that anyone who has been jailed for participating in a DDoS attack should be immediately released, and anything related to the attack should be wiped from their criminal records.

• FBI Enlists US Bank’s Help To Head Off Iranian Cyber Attacks

In order to combat a wave of cyberattacks that have rattled the US banking industry since last year, the FBI has given certain banking executives extensive briefings of their classified investigations. The collaboration is part of a new policy being initiated by the FBI to try and foster closer cooperation between authorities and the private sector.

• Did Hackers Take Down NASDAQ?

News emerged that a significant disruption caused the NASDAQ trading market to shut down for more than three hours starting at 9:20am PST on August 22nd. The problem manifested itself in the quote processing system, prompting the first awareness of the issue.

This seems eerily reminiscent of another NASDAQ incident in May 2013 during which Facebook’s IPO was bungled due to a “software glitch”. That incident prompted a $10 million fine for NASDAQ, but more importantly a rising lack of confidence has emerged in investor sentiment surrounding the technical elements of today’s trading systems. People have questioned whether the structure itself is flawed, and whether there is an overabundance of dependence on technology baked into both trading strategies and automated trading systems.

• CyberBunker Launches “World’s Largest” DDoS Attack, Slows Down The Entire Internet

A massive cyberattack launched by the Dutch web hosting company CyberBunker has caused global disruption of the web, slowing down internet speeds for millions of users across the world, according to a BBC report. CyberBunker launched an all-out assault, described by the BBC as the world’s biggest ever cyberattack, on the self-appointed spam-fighting company Spamhaus, which maintains a blacklist used by email providers to filter out spam.

• Bitcoin Under Attack? Dwolla & Mt. Gox Both Hit With DDoS Attacks Overnight

Another day, another DDoS attack. This time round, it’s the turn of alternative online payments provider Dwolla, which saw its website taken offline for a brief period of time. The site has since come back online, but the company said in a statement that the some users may still experience issues as the attack remains ongoing.