A Chinese online games provider decided that the best way to compete was to attack its rivals with a DDOS attack.

The Chinese bloke called Bing bought a collection of “private servers" and offered online games and advertising services on them. Private servers are usually used to run emulated versions of popular online games like World of Warcraft. Their operators are often unlicensed by the game designers but make money on subscription fees or advertising.

But Bing found that there was too much competition in the market and he was not making enough cash. He also found that his rivals were using DDOS attacks to shut him down. He decided that the only way forward was to launch a few DDOS attacks of his own. Bing and a technical assistant decided to retaliate and spent US$41,000 to rent 81 servers used specifically for attacking private servers, the statement said.

But the assistant's abilities were not up to the ask and his attacks were ineffective. They searched online and found a hacker in eastern Zhejiang province to design a program that could conduct the attack. The assistant booted up the program and it directly attacked DNSPod, a move that would paralyze the DNS servers used by many rival operators of private servers, but would also affect a large number of other Internet companies served by DNSPod.

Bing targeted a domain registrar that serves many small gaming companies and started a chain reaction which managed to shut down a lot of the world wide wibble in China for a while. Bing, 23, has a day job working in a cotton factory, but not any more he was one of four people coppers arrested for destroying China's internet in the interest of making a bob or two.