China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

Post by interdrift » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:50 AM UTC

rmchugh wrote: post #207

valgaze wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Sony pictures incident to the attack on that satirical magazine in Paris to this, it's getting pretty tiresome having to deal with authoritarian types who believe they should dictate what other people can say or access. For those curious, see below for a write up of the malicious javascript (uses a simple ajax call & random number timer): http://insight-labs.org/?p=1682 document.write(" http://libs.baidu.com…

Loading all of jQuery seems a little bit excessive when the only thing they're using is the $.ajax function. http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/#request

Post by westiseast » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 11:06 AM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #202

westiseast wrote: post #75

For me the most interesting thig about this incident is how the GFW is being used offensively. Most other governments so far have protested online censorship from a kind of moral standpoint, but not from a security standpoint per se. Now it's quite clear the GFW is being leveraged offensively - did anyone spot this capability previously?

It's an identical setup to the NSA QUANTUM infrastructure, just in China instead of scattered around the western internet system. So I guess it's probably been used offensively in a more targeted approach for a while.

Post by shawabawa3 » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 11:16 AM UTC

adaml_623 wrote: post #179

shawabawa3 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why not simply generate the traffic yourself ? Couldn't github simply null-route all chinese-origin traffic in that case? Currently the DDoS comes from everywhere except china

The point of this DDoS attack is to prevent people in China from accessing content on github. To null-route chinese-origin traffic would mean that the attackers win. (Obviously VPNs could be used to circumvent this null-route but they then become vulnerable to the same attack)

Post by stefantalpalaru » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 11:33 AM UTC

valgaze wrote: post #125

rattray wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are back on github now; they were indeed temporarily changed to return only alert("WARNING: malicious javascript detected on this domain"); (or something similar). I saw this myself.

From the Sony pictures incident to the attack on that satirical magazine in Paris to this, it's getting pretty tiresome having to deal with authoritarian types who believe they should dictate what other people can say or access. For those curious, see below for a write up of the malicious javascript (uses a simple ajax call & random number timer): http://insight-labs.org/?p=1682 document.write(" http://libs.baidu.com…

Post by zorked » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 11:46 AM UTC

bx_ wrote: post #166

methou wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in China, and I disagree with your statement, but I can understand why you think like that. Usually when you reside in a country for a long time, you don't think the government as a whole, big, flat thing. The size of the it is gigantic, so that anything you do, you might be interacting with government at some level. I'm not judging this but giving you an image of what it's like living in China, salt, gas, new…

> China wants to fork their own internet, for their own people. I thought it was pretty well known that the BRICS countries want their own internet: http://www.infowars.com/brics-countries-build-new-internet-t...