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Tuesdays Internet outage in China is dividing experts over what caused the networking error, with authorities calling it a hacking attack, and others blaming it on the countrys censorship systems.

The outage briefly crippled the Internet in China, with many local websites inaccessible to users. User traffic was mysteriously redirected to a U.S.-based IP address belonging to a company that has hosted software capable of circumventing Chinas online censorship.

The networking error, which only lasted a few hours, affected at least two-thirds of Chinas websites, according to Qihoo 360, a software security vendor in the country.

On Wednesday, local authorities said a preliminary investigation found that a hacking attack caused the outage. Chinas National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team is continuing to investigate the matter.

On the same day, Chinas state-controlled Xinhua News Agency published a story quoting security experts whodemanded authorities do more to protect the nations Internet infrastructure.

Others experts, however, believe the error may have been caused by a glitch in Chinas notorious censorship systems, also known as The Great Firewall.

China routinely blocks sites with content critical of the nations government, including Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times. Tuesdays Internet outage, however, rerouted traffic to an IP address belonging to Dynamic Internet Technology, a U.S. company whose site is also blocked by authorities.

DIT could not be reached immediately for comment. But the companys clients include The Epoch Times, a publication banned in China. It also hosts Freegate software that can help Chinese Internet users view sites blocked in the country.

Some are speculating that hackers hijacked a root DNS (Domain Name System) server in China to reroute all user traffic, said GreatFire.org, a group that monitors Chinas Internet and opposes the nations censorship.

But in a Wednesday posting, GreatFire.org dismissed such claims, noting that a public DNS server operated by Google had also been affected by the networking error. During the outage, users trying to access the Google DNS server from China were also rerouted to the IP address from Dynamic Internet Technology.

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China blames Internet outage on hacking attack

A mysterious glitch in China led to one of the biggest-ever Internet blackouts on Tuesday, forcing massive volumes of Chinese Web traffic to U.S. servers belonging to a firm with a long history of protesting the government in Beijing and evading its censors.

The disruption, which crippled service for most of Chinas roughly 600 million Internet users, began abount 3 p.m. in Beijing (2a.m. EST) and lasted as long as eight hours, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based firm that monitors Web performance.

The official China Internet Network Information Center said the disruption was probably the result of a hacking attack, but Internet experts said that the cause appears to have been a flawed effort by Chinese Web censors part of what is known as the Great Firewall of China to block sites the government deems subversive.

But instead of censoring, the government appears to have momentarily shut down much of the countrys access to the Internet by mistakenly directing all of that Web traffic to servers controlled by Dynamic Internet Technology, a U.S. software company founded by anti-censorship activist Bill Xia.

Xia said in an e-mail that the disruption, which crashed his servers, was caused by Chinas hijacking system, which is part of Chinas Great Firewall. Xia, who moved to the United States from China in the late 1990s, sells software and services to Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-based organization Human Rights in China and Epoch Times, a newspaper published by the Falun Gong religious group.

This incident both communicates the fragility of the Chinese Internet but it also reminds us how robust and resilient their censorship has been, said James Mulvenon, director of Defense Group Inc.s center for intelligence research and analysis.

The Great Firewall works in myriad ways to control what Chinese Internet users can see online, from obstructing searches on sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests to blocking entire Web sites, such as social media sites Facebook and Twitter.

The Chinese government blocks sites by exploiting a weakness in the infrastructure of the Internet. Lets say a user is trying to reach a site by entering the domain name for instance, Facebook.com into a browser. Ordinarily, that request gets sent to whats known as a DNS server, which matches the domain name to an IP address, a series of digits that computers can use to identify each other.

Internet experts say Chinas Great Firewall works by redirecting traffic to erroneous or fake IP addresses. But in the case of Tuesdays glitch, something seemed to go wrong.

A massive amount of traffic was diverted to 65.49.2.178, an IP address affiliated with Xias Dynamic Internet Technology, a group whose work is routinely censored by the Chinese government.

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China accuses hackers for Internet disruption; experts suspect censors

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The future of the Internet will be the focus of a major independent commission announced by officials Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

The group will focus primarily on state censorship of the Internet and the issues of privacy and surveillance, the British newspaper the Guardian reported.

The commission was formed in the wake of disclosures by former U.S. National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden of massive spying efforts by the United States and Britain.

To be headed by Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, the commission will be comprised of 25 people chosen from the fields of politics, academics, and intelligence who will lead a series of public forums around the world.

"The rapid evolution of the net has been made possible by the open and flexible model by which it has evolved and been governed," Bildt said as the commission was announced. "But increasingly this is coming under attack. And this is happening as issues of net freedom, net security and net surveillance are increasingly debated. Net freedom is as fundamental as freedom of information and freedom of speech in our societies."

The two-year inquiry was set up Chatham House, a think tank of Britain's foreign office, and the Center for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI), which is funded in part by Canada.

In a joint statement, Chatham House and CIGI said the Internet was under threat by two sources: states attempting to exert tighter controls over Internet resources and extensive spying on messages and data sent through the Internet.

Chatham House director Robin Niblet said Internet governance "is set to become one of the most pressing global policy issues of our time."

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Global commission to study Internet censorship, privacy issues

Hundreds of millions of Internet users in China were unexpectedly shown a way to overcome the communist countrys strict firewalls on Tuesday afternoon.

The users were simply attempting to access some of the countrys most popular websites. When they typed in the addresses, they were automatically redirected to the homepage of Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a U.S. company that sells anti-censorship technology that allows Chinese citizens to get around the so-called Great Firewall.

It is unclear whether the situation was the work of savvy hackers or the result of some kind of glitch in the Great Firewall.

Reuters reports that DIT has ties to the Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned in China that has been blamed for past hacking attacks.

I dont know who did this or where it came from, but what I want to point out is this reminds us once again that maintaining Internet security needs strengthened international cooperation. This again shows that China is a victim of hacking," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a daily news briefing.

The state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said the attack on the countrys Internet is under investigation, the official CCTV broadcaster wrote on its microblog on Wednesday.

However, sources familiar with the Chinese governments web management operations told Reutersthat a hacking attack was not to blame for the malfunction. They declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

They said the incident may have been the result of an engineering mistake made while making changes to the Great Firewall.

Our investigation shows very clearly that DNS exclusion happened at servers inside of China, said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Information and an expert on Chinas Internet controls.

It all points to the Great Firewall, because thats where it can simultaneously influence DNS resolutions of all the different networks [in China]. But how that happened or why that happened were not sure. Its definitely not the Great Firewalls normal behavior.

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China Internet outage redirects users to anti-censorship site

Lost In Censorship | Beyond Zotte Park
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