By Shannon Tiezzi
China’s internet censorship went on the offensive this week, enlisting computers around the world in a DDoS attack.
Last week, China’s internet censorship apparently began playing offense – GitHub was the target of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack beginning last Thursday. The attack targeted two specific pages on GitHub’s site: the page for the Chinese-language version of the New York Times and the page for GreatFire.org, a group dedicated to exposing and circumventing Chinese online censorship.
GreatFire.org also said it had been the subject of a major DDoS attack beginning in mid-March, after which GreatFire.org began mirroring content on GitHub. The attack on GitHub came after GreatFire.org began asking users to access the GitHub page directly. GitHub called the attack the “largest DDos” ever launched against the site.
In investigating the attack, GreatFire.org discovered that the hacking was making use of “millions of global internet users.” Unsuspecting users had their computers infected with code that caused their machines to constantly reload the targeted webpages. One of the major sources for the virus was apparently the analytics script used by Baidu, China’s major search engine. The script, used on websites around the world to monitor traffic, became the vector for a massive cyberattack – one that, in GreatFire.org’s words, “compromised internet users and websites everywhere in the world.” In affect, millions of innocent internet users became weapons in the attack on GitHub and GreatFire.org.
Read the full story at The Diplomat