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China's Great Firewall Infects Other Countries

Posted by Soulskill on from the trial-run-successful dept.

angry tapir writes "A networking error has caused computers in Chile and the US to come under the control of the Great Firewall of China, redirecting Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube users to Chinese servers. Security experts are not sure exactly how this happened, but it appears that at least one ISP recently began fetching high-level DNS information, from what's known as a root DNS server, based in China. That server, operated out of China by Swedish service provider Netnod, returned DNS information intended for Chinese users, effectively spreading China's network censorship overseas."

2 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Now... by sopssa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's the other way around than what you're suggesting. Chinese didn't try do anything. ISP's elsewhere mistakenly configured their servers to use Chinese DNS servers.

    They are keeping their shit for them. It's just that someone else is fetching it from them to elsewhere.

  2. Problems like this should be prevented by Lorens · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So any wrongful destination now has a lot of passwords. Especially IMAP and POP and suchlike, not even a need to set up a misleading website, you can play totally innocent.

    Prevention:

    1) Don't have a root server in a country that wants to censor information

    2) Implement free SSL certs so that it is no longer "normal" to just click through the SSL cert alert

    3) DNSCurve, DNSSEC, whatever

    4) Encrypt.

    5) Even when using encryption always use auth schemes that cannot be replayed afterwards. Without certs I don't think you can stop MITM, but much too many people use only one password for a lot of different things, at least that one won't be in the sniffer's hands.

    More?