Cyber attack on China’s biggest OTA
China’s biggest online travel agency Ctrip.com International Ltd was back online after a cyberattack forced its website and mobile app to go offline for 12 hours.
According to the company’s first quarter profit data, Ctrip.com lost $1.07 million per hour due to the cyberattack, according to China Daily.
The company said in an official statement that the attack had damaged part of its servers. It said its technicians and engineers were working hard to restore all services.
The company denied rumours that all of its data were deleted and there were no data backups, saying “there is no loss of data on the platform and ordering data are kept intact”. Users who clicked on the company’s website were directed to a page with the message “service unavailable”. Its search engine service and other links were also not accessible.
“According to our investigations, all user data are safe with us right now. There is no danger,” the company said.
The attack came just days after Ctrip received a financial boost of $250 million from the world’s largest online travel operator Priceline.com LLC.
According to a report by the Beijing-based Internet consultancy Analysys International, Ctrip accounts for 31.1 percent of China’s booming online travel sector, which amounted to 33.2 billion yuan ($5.4 billion) in 2014.
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