Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House? American Hacks ?

Alarm bells should ring for Internet security

Global Times-2 hours ago

This is a severe attack against the Chinese Internet. ... if cities like Beijing and Shanghai seeing chaos in their power grid for three consecutive ...

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/838921.shtml#.UuAffXkyFkg

Alarm bells should ring for Internet security

Global Times | 2014-1-23 0:48:02
By Global Times

Around 3:10 pm Tuesday, China's top-level domain name root servers malfunctioned, leading to a widespread domain name outage. Many websites were redirected to 65.49.2.178, an IP address that is believed by analysts to belong to a US-based website run by Dynamic Internet Technology, which has denied any responsibility for the incident.

This is a severe attack against the Chinese Internet. It is necessary to make clear what is behind it and what specific consequences have been caused.

We strongly require Washington, which maintains absolute control of the Internet to launch an investigation and publish the findings. If the US fails to deal with the incident properly, Chinese trust toward the US over the Internet will be damaged. The incident may even become a prominent example for those seeking to conduct Web hacking against the US.

Of the 13 root servers that manage global Internet traffic, 10 are located in the US. The US is even more hegemonic in the virtual world than in the real world. Top-level domain names for both Iraq and Libya were blocked by Washington in wartime, leading to the two countries' "evaporation" from the global Internet.

Theoretically, such a threat could be imposed on China anytime the US wants. Washington is capable of striking China physically through its virtual power. For instance, today we can hardly isolate our electrical power grid from the global Internet. It is beyond thinking about if cities like Beijing and Shanghai seeing chaos in their power grid for three consecutive days.

China lags behind the US in terms of social understanding about virtual space.

Compared with other countries, it is more urgent for China to consolidate its Internet security. As a rising power, China is seen as a competitor by the US. But meanwhile, China's IT structure is still very weak, and China cannot simply isolate itself for the sake of security. It can rely upon no one else but itself to find out the way to build proper "Internet defenses" for such a complicated developing country.

China has to accelerate development and innovation of key Internet technology, which is the prerequisite to ensure security.

Systematic collaboration is also needed, including top-level strategic design, cooperation between government agencies and between government and enterprises, as well as fostering social awareness of Internet security.

Washington has refused to transfer Internet control to the UN despite worldwide appeals. The US own national interest dominates virtual society, which is the biggest tacit rule of the global Internet.

China should be alarmed by the serious DNS outage, and take action to avoid as many traps on the Internet as possible. We cannot remove all those traps, but we can become increasingly sophisticated in dealing with them.

Analysts blame faults in 'Great firewall' for China web outage

Financial Times-6 hours ago

A high-level malfunction in China's internet architecture put as many as two-thirds of the country's domain websites out of action for several ...

China Internet outage could have been hacking attack, says Xinhua

The Malay Mail Online-17 hours ago

The Xinhua report quoted Chinese security experts saying the outage could have been exploited by hackers, or could have been the result of

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/chinese-internet-traffic-redirected-to-small-wyoming-house/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House

By NICOLE PERLROTH

2710 Thomes Avenue, seen in 2011, is located on a sleepy block in Cheyenne, Wyo. Much of China's Internet traffic on Tuesday was redirected to this address.

Reuters 2710 Thomes Avenue, seen in 2011, is located on a sleepy block in Cheyenne, Wyo. Much of China’s Internet traffic on Tuesday was redirected to this address.

In one of the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, much of the Internet traffic in China was redirected to a small, 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Tuesday.

A large portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based technology company.

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s domain name system servers.

Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo.

A simple Google search reveals that the address on Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne is not a corporate headquarters, but a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn.

That address — which is home to some 2,000 companies on paper — was the subject of a lengthy 2011 Reuters investigation that found that among the entities registered to the address were a shell company controlled by a jailed former Ukraine prime minister; the owner of a company charged with helping online poker operators evade an Internet gambling ban; and one entity that was banned from government contracts after selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

Wyoming Corporate Services, the registered agent for Sophidea Incorporated, according to Internet records, did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon.

It was not immediately clear what caused the traffic shift Tuesday. One Chinese newspaper suspected a cyberattack. But by late Tuesday, some technologists had come to an alternate theory: a backfiring of China’s own Internet censoring system.

Sophidea appears to be a service that redirects traffic from one address to another to mask a person’s whereabouts — or to evade a firewall.

Some technologists surmised Tuesday that the disruption may have been caused by Chinese Internet censors who attempted to block traffic to Sophidea’s websites but mistakenly redirected traffic to the service instead.

That theory was buttressed by the fact that a separate wave of Chinese Internet traffic Tuesday was simultaneously redirected to Internet addresses owned by Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that helps people evade China’s Great Firewall, and is typically blocked in China.

Bill Xia, who created Dynamic Internet Technology in 2001, told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that his company had nothing to do with the traffic shift and also suspected that the problem was the doing of China’s own Internet censors.

Nicole Perlroth reported from San Francisco. David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai.

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