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

People are such suckers

[qortra]

The goal, authorities say, is to protect children from pornography

Of course, that morsel isn't for the Chinese people. They could tell their own people "we're creating a botnet to terrorize you", and nothing would happen. In fact, it's for the benefit of people in other countries. Social conservatives everywhere will exclaim "what an excellent goal!" Those people have simply failed to realize that governments will use whatever power they have for whatever they want, and never exclusively for its "intended purpose". The US does this too, but they've been moving more slowly because more people fail to notice when the power shift is gradual.

M$ made largest botnet, Cisco the next Echelon

[kubitus]

The US is in the dominant position regarding hidden backdoors and establishing Trojan Boot loaders into routers.

I advice any government to use in their networks only SW they can compile by themselfes!

And even more important: use routers ( and switches ) where they compiled the firmware/software themselves!