Is China Creating the World's Largest Botnet Army?

david_a_eaves writes "The Chinese government is mandating that all computers sold in China come with Internet blocking software. Rob Cottingham writes an excellent piece noting how the censorship application of this software should be the least of our concerns. This new software may create an opportunity for the Chinese Government to appropriate these computers and use them to create the worlds largest botnet army." Update: 06/11 21:26 GMT by T : J. Alex Halderman writes "My students and I have been examining the Green Dam censorware software. We've found serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited by any web site a user visits with the software installed. We also found that some of the blacklists seems to have been taken from the American-made filtering program CyberSitter. We've posted a report and demo."

Don't usually get dupes the same day

[DrData99]

Did I miss something or isn't this essentially the same story as this:http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/06/11/1347219/Chinese-Govt-Spyware-Puts-Computers-At-Risk?art_pos=9 [slashdot.org]

Easily identifiable source = easy blocked traffic

[nuckfuts]

What makes a botnet potentially devastating is that it can create traffic that's indistinguishable from legitimate traffic. When a large enough number of computers from random locations request a page from your webserver, how do you sort the bad requests from the good? It's the slashdot effect on steroids.

If all the traffic was originating from within a particular country, it would be straightfoward to drop that traffic and let other traffic through.

It's interesting to note that in the early days, it wasn't possible to determine geographic location based on IP address. Address blocks were originally assigned rather haphazardly. As the number of networks grew, routers had to store larger and larger routing tables. Eventually this led to a push to reorganize address block allocations in a more hierarchical fashion, which ultimately made geolocation possible.

Re:Look....

[illiter4te]

Look

at this... under sea map of fiber connections [guardian.co.uk] How do you propose the US cut off those connections?

all chineese botnet?

[bizitch]

Assuming that this is true - all the bots would be contained inside China

If they unleashed the botnet on something outside China

1) Would it not just crush the internal network(s) inside China?
2) Would it not just crush the connections to the rest of the world?
3) Would it not just crush the massive control and filter systems?
4) Would it not just super easy to identify and quarantine?

What am I missing here?

Re:Correct me if I am wrong...

[John Hasler]

Last year exports to the USA accounted for about 24% of Chinese exports but only about 13% of USA imports. USA exports accounted for about 6.5% of Chinese imports but only about 4% of USA exports. I wouldn't be so sure about who is dependent on who.

Re:Is this a problem?

[Arthur Grumbine]

Why are the replies modded funny? Someone's doing a crappy job of moderating today.

Or a great job. Personally, I find it entertaining to read a comment waiting for the punchline, then re-read it thinking I 'missed' something. It speaks volumes to degree I have been conditioned to trust the mods. A round of "off-modding" like this gives me a chance to reflect on my own reading-of-Slashdot habits. Quite refreshing.

Of course, in all my comments I make sure to include a "little bit of everything", so that the less discerning reader can say "Oh! That's why this comment is Insightful/Interesting/Informative/Funny/Flamebait/Troll/Off-topic!".

Also, I think the mods are on crack.

Also, fuck you.

Re:It is a problem

[tattood]

The interconnect routers are all using hardware ASICs for their routing. It is absolutely NO problem for a core Internet router to block an entire subnet/country without a single hiccup.