Cyberattacks that temporarily paralyzed government Web sites and manipulated display screens at convenience stores and a train station coincided with the arrival of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taipei on Tuesday, with Chinese hackers likely to blame.

On Tuesday, the Presidential Office’s Web site was taken offline for about 20 minutes following a distributed denial of service attack, in which multiple computers are focused on a single target in an attempt to take it offline.

The government’s official English-language portal and Web sites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of National Defense and Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport were also targeted, causing short shutdowns from Tuesday to Friday.

On Wednesday, display screens behind the cashiers at some 7-Eleven convenience stores abruptly changed to a message calling Pelosi a “warmonger” and saying “get out of Taiwan.”

A public display screen at a train station showed a message calling Pelosi’s visit “a severe provocation to the motherland” and “the great China will be united” in simplified Chinese characters.

On Thursday, the Kaohsiung Environmental Protection Bureau’s Web site was changed to show China’s national flag.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) said that the government’s English portal and the foreign ministry’s Web sites had since Tuesday detected massive attacks from Internet protocol addresses in China, Russia and other places, with up to 17 million requests per minute reported.

Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang (唐鳳) — who on Friday was announced as the first minister of digital affairs — said that the volume of cyberattacks on government Web sites on Tuesday was unprecedented, exceeding 15,000 gigabits in a day, about 23 times more than the previous record.

The APT 27 hacker group, a China-based group that Western governments suspect is behind several attacks on companies and state agencies, on Wednesday released a YouTube video saying that it would conduct “a special cyberoperation against Taiwan,” including “the Taiwan government and all infrastructure” to oppose the provocation by Pelosi’s visit, although the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to comment on the issue.

The cyberactivity, along with Beijing’s unprecedented military drills, are at first glance a furious response to Pelosi’s visit, but they also seem to be a show of its military power to invade or blockade Taiwan, indicating what China’s “hybrid warfare” might look like if it were to launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan.

Although the Cabinet said that the operations of government agencies and transportation networks were not affected by the cyberattacks, the incidents should not be overlooked, as obstruction of public-government communication and the spread of disinformation can erode public trust in the government.

The government should conduct a cybersecurity review of its critical agencies and key infrastructure — such as power plants, electric grids, pipelines, telecommunications services and transportation networks — to make sure they are not vulnerable to more sophisticated and damaging cyberattacks.

It should also consider “crowdsourcing” cybersecurity experts by offering rewards for people to test, discover and report security vulnerabilities in government systems.

Moreover, the government should urge the private sector to remain watchful, step up their cyberdefenses and immediately report incidents, as data from the past few years suggest that cyberattacks will continue to increase.

In Chinese author Lu Xun’s (魯迅) novella The True Story of Ah Q (阿Q正傳) — one of the earliest works of modern Chinese fiction, first serialized in 1921 — the story’s hapless protagonist, Ah Q (阿Q), is a poor itinerant worker from China’s peasant class, living during the part-feudal, part-colonial dying embers of the Qing Dynasty. Ah Q is a feeble and psychologically flawed individual who bullies the meek and cowers before the powerful. Despised and regularly mocked by villagers, after every episode of public ridicule and failure, Ah Q consoles himself that he has won a “spiritual victory.” Utterly

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would render the company’s plants inoperable, and that such a war would produce “no winners.” Not only would Taiwan’s economy be destroyed in a cross-strait conflict, but the impact “would go well beyond semiconductors, and would bring about the destruction of the world’s rules-based order and totally change the geopolitical landscape,” Liu said in the interview, according to the Central News Agency. Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands wrote on June 24: “A major war over Taiwan could create global economic

Washington’s official position on US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is that nothing has changed: The US government says it is maintaining its “one China” policy, that Pelosi is free to arrange international trips with congressional delegations independent of the government and that she is not the first US official to visit Taiwan even this year. Yet there is no denying that the fact and the optics of the second-in-line to the US presidency speaking with lawmakers at the Legislative Yuan about inter-parliamentary discussions and learning from each other as equals are hugely significant, as were

Amid a fervor in the global media, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her congressional delegation made a high-profile visit to Taipei. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) awarded a state honor to her at the Presidential Office. Evidently, the occasion took on the aspect of an inter-state relationship between the US and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, despite no mutual state recognition between the two. Beijing furiously condemned Pelosi’s visit in advance, with military drills in the waters surrounding coastal China to check the move. Pelosi is a well-known China hawk, and second in the line of succession to