Is China Creating the World's Largest Botnet Army?

david_a_eaves writes "The Chinese government is mandating that all computers sold in China come with Internet blocking software. Rob Cottingham writes an excellent piece noting how the censorship application of this software should be the least of our concerns. This new software may create an opportunity for the Chinese Government to appropriate these computers and use them to create the worlds largest botnet army." Update: 06/11 21:26 GMT by T : J. Alex Halderman writes "My students and I have been examining the Green Dam censorware software. We've found serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited by any web site a user visits with the software installed. We also found that some of the blacklists seems to have been taken from the American-made filtering program CyberSitter. We've posted a report and demo."

Comments

Or just block their IP space

[Sycraft-fu]

The only reason botnets are so effective is they are distributed. When they come from all over the place, you have to do a ton of individual blocks. If they are all from the same IP space, ok just black hole China's space and that's it. Wouldn't take a block from very many top level providers and they'd be doing nothing at all.

Re:It is a problem

[Shakrai]

To be able to block, at the very least the packet header has to be examined. If remote attacker can generate packets faster than you can examine and drop them, you've just been DoS'ed.

You also have to look at the packet header in the course of regular routing decisions. Would it really take more CPU to look at the packet header and drop it into /dev/null than it does to look at the packet header and send it out a different network interface?