Anonymous blamed for global Internet slowdowns

Anonymous is claiming responsibility for a cyberattack against Chinese websites — one that may also be having an impact on Internet speeds across the world, Mashable reported.

Networks in North America, Europe and especially Asia were running at significantly lower speeds Thursday. Asia’s cyber backbone was especially hard hit, seeing packet loss of 33% or more, according to the monitoring website Internet Traffic Report.

There was no explicit connection between the site defacements and the Asian slowdown. But Anonymous’s attacks also often come in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Thousands of connections are made to a specific server causing it to crash from an overload of web traffic.