Chinese Internet went down

Last week, China suffered a major Internet outage for several hours. Experts question whether it could be due to some hacking or technical problem in the censorship system.

On January 21^st, more than two-third of Chinese websites were inaccessible and therefore millions of users have been deprived of internet for about 8 hours, according on Qihoo 360, a Chinese security software provider.

Some therefore speak about piracy acts and other blame the country censorship system called “Great Firewall”.

Local authorities conducted some investigation that may lead to some act of piracy. The Chinese CERT team continues its investigation on its side. Experts believe that hackers have hijacked a DNS server root in China to reroute all traffic. Greatfire.org site that analyzes Internet censorship in China, questioned this referring to the fact that Google’s DNS servers were also affected.

During the blackout, users were redirected to an IP address belonging to Dynamic Internet Technology, a company which based in the United States: the company offers a tool called FreeGate to counter restrictions in China. This address is in fact related to dongtaiwang.com, an information portal belonging to the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement which represents Chinese government biggest nightmare. If the official news agency New China has raised the possibility of hacking and information on the Internet in China Centre (CNNIC) , meanwhile a government agency, has mentioned possible technical failure.

China regularly blocks sites content criticizing the government, including Facebook, Twitter and the New York Times. According to Greatfire.org, while aiming at blocking the Dynamic Internet Technology site, the Chinese authorities may have inadvertently re-routing the traffic across the whole nation.

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