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I didn’t see this anywhere in the article (maybe I missed it), but because this utilizes the Great Firewall, it’s undoubtedly done by the Chinese government, ri
by fortytw2 7y ago
I didn’t see this anywhere in the article (maybe I missed it), but because this utilizes the Great Firewall, it’s undoubtedly done by the Chinese government, right?
- nradov 7y agoThat's the implication but as with most cyber attacks it's impossible to really prove the source.
- dannyw 7y agoThis is one of the cyber attacks where the source is proven.
- nradov 7y agoWe all know who the attacker is here, but it's not literally "proven" to the standard of evidence that would be required in a US court. The attacker still has plausible deniability.
- johncolanduoni 7y ago“Someone else who has the ability to MITM millions of users in China did it” doesn’t sound particularly plausible to me.
- simias 7y agoI know that this website is very USA-centric but I really fail to see what US courts have to do with the subject at hand. The question is more "as far as the international community is concerned, is there any reasonable technical doubt that the Chinese authorities are behind this?" This is important for public discourse at least, because if it's technically undeniable that Chinese authorities are behind this attack then you can immediately assume than anybody saying that China has nothing to do with it is either acting in bad faith or is largely uninformed. As we've seen multiple times in the past the existence or non-existence of conclusive proof is largely irrelevant when it comes to international policy anyway so the opinion of US courts is frankly besides the point.
- raverbashing 7y agoSo, what happens if the endpoints start returning data that triggers the GF?
- romaaeterna 7y agoNo. "Behind the Great Firewall" is another way of saying "served from China". Perhaps -- or even most likely -- it is the government. But this is hardly a smoking gun. There are plenty of people on the mainland that hate what's going on in HK, and who are not the government.
- lallysingh 7y agoAlso the Great Firewall isn't one box admin'd by a single actor. It's a set of network firewalls managed by different network entities to fulfill legal obligations. It could be one of them acting alone. Then there's the question of how separate the operating company is from the Party..
- ufmace 7y agoActing alone? Yeah right. Do that in the PRC, and you'll probably be in a "reeducation camp" by the end of the week.
- throw5543265 7y agoInterestingly, Xi was sent to a re-education camp in his youth and now he is the most powerful person in China.
- revicon 7y agoHow would a non-government entity achieve this?
- riffraff 7y agopwn a couple ad servers and service the poisoned js. It doesn't seem something that a dedicated malicious hacker group couldn't do.
- rndgermandude 7y agoExcept that's not what's happening here, unless your claim is they compromised baidu and Qihoo 360 and both don't care to fix it. baidu and Qihoo 360 are massive companies. Serving the stuff either means they are doing it deliberately (on behalf of the government), or an active MITM is doing it, which given the scale can only mean ISP and ergo (since this is China) government level. The active MITM seems plausible since a) only unencrypted http traffic gets injected (so far), and b) the Chinese government wouldn't want to put the onus on two of their most important internet companies alone.
- zhte415 7y agoThe first paragraph of the article mentions > operates by injecting malicious Javascript into pages served from behind the Great Firewall. These scripts, potentially served to millions of users across the internet, hijack the users’ connections to make multiple requests against the targeted site. These requests consume all the resources of the targeted site, making it unavailable:
- fortytw2 7y agoYes, and I would imagine that could only be done inside of the Great Firewall, which I’m pretty sure is operated by the Chinese Government?
- gruez 7y agoSo basically browser vendors need to add all Chinese hosting sites to their safebrowsing blacklist?
- dmix 7y agoIt’s coming from a Baidu domain which is one of the biggest sites in the world. That might be a bit difficult...
- gruez 7y agoIf you're negligent in securing your site and it gets infected, your site should be blocked. You shouldn't be able say "well it's technically not us, it's the CCP!" whilst not doing anything about it. As for badiu being a major site, that can be resolved by browser vendors displaying a special page explaining to its users of the situation.