A denial of service attack that took down Internet access in parts of China earlier this year has been attributed to an over-enthusiastic game provider trying to take down rivals. Police in Foshan, a city in Guangdong, have announced that they arrested four individuals for the attack, noting that they would go to trial sometime in the mysterious future.

The group was headed up by a 23-year-old factory worker with the surname Bing, according to the police announcement. Bing and his cohorts had set up a number of private servers for gamers to use, but weren't making much money because rivals had been engaging in distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks against them, constantly taking down the service. Bing was apparently angered by this and decided to drop 280,000 yuan (roughly US$41,000) to rent even more servers for the sole purpose of retaliating against his own attackers.

Unfortunately, these efforts were not very concentrated—Bing and the gang apparently launched their attack against every DNS server they could find belonging to DNSPod, a company that provides services to other gaming servers. The problem arose when numbers of users attempted to use the servers connected to DNSPod; their requests were denied and passed onto China Telecom, which couldn't handle all the requests. It ended up taking down the gaming service as well as numerous other websites that were connected to those DNS servers. According to DNSPod, even Baidu (the top search engine in China) became completely inaccessible in certain parts of China.

Foshan officials confirmed that they had detained the four individuals in June and later made their official arrests. As pointed out by IDG News Service, incidents like this are both common (DDoS attacks between game operators are old hat) and uncommon (police rarely have the jurisdiction or training needed to pursue such a case), though the latter may be the reason why a more widespread crackdown on this behavior may take some time.