China Blames Massive Internet Blackout On Hackers

[Williamj]

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Chinese officials Wednesday blamed a country-wide Internet outage on a hack attack. But security and networking experts suspect that the country's Internet infrastructure was compromised when Chinese government censors inadvertently blocked every website in the world.
What's Chinese for schadenfreude?

The official story from China didn't involve stifling freedom of expression. Instead, government officials blamed a domain name system (DNS) malfunction Tuesday for leaving the country's nearly 600 million Internet users without access to websites for 45 minutes. "We have tracked and analyzed the DNS and found that at least two of the 13 root name servers around the world were affected," said Dong Fang, an Internet engineer at Chinese security product vendor Qihoo 360, according to the Xinhua News Agency, which is the Chinese government's official press agency.


[Hacktivists have new tools in their arsenal. See Politically Motivated Cyberattackers Adopt New Tactics.]
Xinhua spun the apparent hack attack and resulting outage as a reason why China could no longer trust other countries to handle the DNS infrastructure. "All the root name servers are located in the United States, Japan, and European countries. A problem with them would affect all the domain name processes and website visits in China," Fang said. "Building root domain name servers in China should be completed as soon as possible."
But researchers at GreatFire.org, an anticensorship organization, disputed that version of events, saying in a blog post that the outage appeared to be caused by a government-initiated DNS poisoning attempt that went wrong. DNS poisoning refers to rerouting requests for certain websites to a different website, and is actively used by Chinese censors.
"We have conclusive evidence that this outage was caused by the Great Firewall," the researchers said. During the outage, notably, "we see that a lookup to 8.8.8.8, a public DNS operated by Google, returned bogus results if the lookup was done from China." Since that DNS wasn't one of the root name servers that was supposedly hacked, it should have resolved to the actual address.

nstead, even lookups to the Google-operated DNS resolved -- along with every other DNS attempt from inside China -- to 65.49.2.178, which is owned by Dynamic Internet Technology, which makes a censorship-circumvention tool called FreeGate. The site also contains a mirror of a news portal for practitioners of Falun Gong, which is banned in China.
"One hypothesis is that [the Great Firewall] might have intended to block the IP but accidentally used that IP to poison all domains," the GreatFire.org researchers said. According to the Pew Research Center, China has more Internet users than nearly all other countries -- baring India -- have people.

[jacobm]

china has there power of access to business

[shaggie]

were anonymous we dont have enemies and friends etc.....

[jacobm]

up daw ta ani, basin invasion na ugma

[lorainet]

up daw ta ani, basin invasion na ugma

maayo gyud, government should be looking on this closely

[Xanther]

kuyawan na ang china nilihuk na ang japan ug ang pinas

[ComRef]

grabe sa china oi. . . . ang pinas ma under nya sa china k atong gov hali ang focus. . .. hukuspukos

[shaggie]

aggresive china is afraid also of other asian country

[MarieKris]

Bank Of China Investigated For Money Laundering By China's Central Bank - Business Insider

[shaggie]

we should equip ourself and also the private company for security purposes also