Chinese Internet censors turn attention to rest of world...

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: January 12, 2019 at 12:33:22 GMT+9
> To: Interesting Stuff list <is () iconia com>
> Subject: IS: Chinese Internet censors turn attention to rest of world...
>
> When Chinese hackers declared war on the rest of us
> Many thought the internet would bring democracy to China. Instead it empowered rampant government oppression, and now 
> the censors are turning their attention to the rest of the world.
> EXCERPT:
> Late one Wednesday in March 2015, an alarm sounded in the offices of GitHub, a San Francisco–based software firm. The 
> company’s offices exemplified the kind of Scandinavia-meets-soullessness style that has spread out from Silicon 
> Valley to take over modern workplaces: exposed wood, open spaces, and lots of natural light. Most employees were 
> preparing to leave, if they hadn’t already. Outside, the sun had started to set and it was balmy and clear.
>
> Alarms weren’t uncommon at GitHub. The company claims to maintain the largest repository of computer code in the 
> world. It had some 14 million users at the time, and prides itself on maintaining its service and staying online. 
> GitHub’s core product is a set of editing tools that allow large numbers of programmers to collaborate on software 
> and keep track of changes as bugs are fixed. In October 2018, Microsoft would buy it for $7.5 billion.
>
> Back in 2015, though, GitHub was still an up-and-coming, independent company whose success came from making it 
> considerably easier for other people to create computer software. The first alarm indicated there was a large amount 
> of incoming traffic to several projects stored on GitHub. This could be innocent—maybe a company had just launched a 
> big new update—or something more sinister. Depending on how the traffic was clustered, more alarms would sound if the 
> sudden influx was impacting service sitewide. The alarms sounded. GitHub was being DDoS-ed.
>
> One of the most frequent causes of any website going down is a sharp spike in traffic. Servers get overwhelmed with 
> requests, causing them to crash or slow to a torturous grind. Sometimes this happens simply because the website 
> suddenly becomes popular. Other times, as in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the spike is maliciously 
> engineered. In recent years, such attacks have grown more common: hackers have taken to infecting large numbers of 
> computers with viruses, which they then use to take control of the computers, enlisting them in the DDoS attack.
>
> In the company’s internal chat room, GitHub engineers realized they would be tackling the attack “for some time.” As 
> the hours stretched into days, it became something of a competition between the GitHub engineers and whoever was on 
> the other end of the attack. Working long, frantic shifts, the team didn’t have much time to speculate about the 
> attackers’ identity. As rumors abounded online, GitHub would only say, “We believe the intent of this attack is to 
> convince us to remove a specific class of content.” About a 20-minute drive away, across San Francisco Bay, Nicholas 
> Weaver thought he knew the culprit: China.“We are currently experiencing the largest DDoS attack in GitHub’s 
> history,” senior developer Jesse Newland wrote in a blog post almost 24 hours after the attack had begun. Over the 
> next five days, as engineers spent 120 hours combating the attack, GitHub went down nine times. It was like a hydra: 
> every time the team thought they had a handle on it, the attack adapted and redoubled its efforts. GitHub wouldn’t 
> comment on the record, but a team member who spoke to me anonymously said it was “very obvious that this was 
> something we’d never seen before.”
>
> Weaver is a network-security expert at the International Computer Science Institute, a research center in Berkeley, 
> California. Together with other researchers, he helped pinpoint the targets of the attack: two GitHub-hosted projects 
> connected to GreatFire.org, a China-based anti-censorship organization. The two projects enabled users in China to 
> visit both GreatFire’s website and the Chinese-language version of the New York Times, both of which are normally 
> inaccessible to users in China. GreatFire, dubbed a “foreign anti-Chinese organization” by the Cyberspace 
> Administration of China, had long been a target of DDoS and hacking attacks, which is why it moved some of its 
> services to GitHub, where they were nominally out of harm’s way.
>
> Whoever was controlling the Great Cannon would use it to selectively insert malicious JavaScript code into search 
> queries and advertisements served by Baidu, a popular Chinese search engine. That code then directed enormous amounts 
> of traffic to the cannon’s targets. By sending a number of requests to the servers from which the Great Cannon was 
> directing traffic, the researchers were able to piece together how it behaved and gain insight into its inner 
> workings. The cannon could also be used for other malware attacks besides denial-of-service attacks. It was a 
> powerful new tool: “Deploying the Great Cannon is a major shift in tactics, and has a highly visible impact,” Weaver 
> and his coauthors wrote...Weaver found something new and worrisome when he examined the attack. In a paper coauthored 
> with researchers at Citizen Lab, an activist and research group at the University of Toronto, Weaver described a new 
> Chinese cyberweapon that he dubbed the “Great Cannon.” The “Great Firewall” — an elaborate scheme of interrelated 
> technologies for censoring internet content coming from outside China—was already well-known. Weaver and the Citizen 
> Lab researchers found that not only was China blocking bits and bytes of data that were trying to make their way into 
> China, but it was also channeling the flow of data out of China...
>
> [...]
> MIT https://www.TechnologyReview.com/s/612638/when-chinese-hackers-declared-war-on-the-rest-of-us/
>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com  



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