More than 650,000 Chinese smartphones have been
unwittingly enrolled in a massive attack that overwhelmed
a web server.
The huge attack saw the target site hit with about 4.5 billion
separate requests for data in one day.
The tidal wave of data was traced to a pool of booby-
trapped adverts that had been seeded with malicious code.
The adverts seem to have been shown in apps popular in
China, said Cloudflare, which uncovered the data deluge.
Analysis found that it relied on the widely used Javascript
language as it tried to knock the site offline.
"It seems probable that users were served advertisements
containing the malicious Javascript," wrote Cloudflare
security analyst Marek Majkowski in a blogpost.
What was not entirely clear, said Mr Majkowski, was how so
many Chinese phone owners were tricked into visiting the
pages hosting the booby-trapped adverts.
He speculated that the attack had worked because its
creators had joined one of the networks that piped adverts
to people as they browsed the web.
Many of these ad networks run live auctions with the
available slots going to the firm that bids the highest. By
bidding high, the cybercriminals seem to have won the right
to get their adverts in front of lots of people, he said.
"Attacks like this form a new trend," said Mr Majkowski.
"They present a great danger in the internet - defending
against this type of flood is not easy for small website
operators."
The target site received more web traffic in a day than the
BBC's news website gets in a month. Cloudflare did not
name the company that ran the server that was hit.
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