UpdateChinese censors’ blunder caused massive internet blackout: US experts
After Chinese government claims it was a cyberattack, more analysts come out to say huge glitch was caused by China's own internet police
An effort by China’s internet police to block “subversive” sites misfired and caused the massive internet blackout this week, which saw Chinese web traffic diverted to US servers owned by a company that has been critical of the Chinese government, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Experts have estimated that some 200 to 600 million internet users could not access any .com or .net websites for a period of three to eight hours. This made impossible any online activity, from money transfers to e-business transactions, to posting on social networks.
The rule was supposed to be, ‘Block everything going to this IP address.’ Instead, they screwed up
The users were instead diverted to a blank website, maintained on servers run by US-based Dynamic Internet Technology, a firm founded by anti-censorship activist Bill Xia, the newspaper said.
The censors – part of what is called the “Great Firewall of China” – usually block access to certain sites by redirecting traffic to fake or invalid IP addresses. But in Tuesday’s glitch, they sent the traffic to a Dynamic-linked IP address, the report said.
“The rule was supposed to be, ‘Block everything going to this IP address.’ Instead, they screwed up and probably wrote the rule as ‘Block everything by referring to this IP address’,” International Computer Science Institute researcher Nicholas Weaver was quoted as saying.
Another researcher, from Washington, noted seeing a similar glitches in Iran.